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PRESENTED BY 



ATION 



The weary pilgrim oft tftb seek to know 
How far he 's come, how^r he has to go. 

QuARLES. 

Ghosts ! There are nigh a thousand million of them walking the 
earth openly at noontide ; some half hundred have vanished from it, 
some half hundred have arisen in it, ere &J watch tick one. 

Carlyle. 

Truth dwells in gulphs, whose dee^ikSg shac | es so rich 
That Night sits muffled there in clouds of piw^, 
More darke than Nature made her : and requires 
(To clear e her tough mists) heaven's great fire of fires 
To wrestle with those heaven-strong mysteries. 

George Chapman. 

I am : how little more I know ! 
Whence came I ? Whither do I go ? 
A central self which feels and is ; 
A cry between the silences ; 
A shadow-birth of clouds at strife 
With sunshine on the hills of life ; 
A shaft from Nature's quiver cast 
Into the future from the past. 

Whittier. 

Where wert thou, Soul, ere yet my body born 
Became thy dwelling-place ? Didst thou on earth 
Or in the clouds, await this body's birth, 
Or by what chance upon that winter's morn 
Didst thou this body find, a babe forlorn ? 
Didst thou in sorrow enter, or in mirth ? 
Or for a jest, perchance, to try its worth 
Thau tookest flesh, ne'er from it to be torn. 



\ 



A STUDY OF FORGOTTEN TRUTH 



BY 

E. D. WALKER 



u Ex oriente lux * 



'If . If. Stewart, 

BOOKS, MUSIC, 

Stationery, Etc, 
524 Church St., 

NASHVILLE, TENN. 




NEW YORK 
JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY 

150 Worth Street, corner Mission Placb 



Copyright, 1888, 
By E. D. WALKER. 












To 

THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH 

AND TO 
THAT EMBODIMENT OF TRUTH, NAMED 

ARIEL, 

THIS LITTLE VOLUME PROMPTED BY THEM 

f £ #eiricatet>, 

WITH THE HOPE THAT THEY ARE NOT HERE DISHONORED 
BY THEIR DISCIPLE, 

THE AUTHOR. 



Soul, dwelling oft in God's infinitude 

And sometimes seeming no more part of me — 

This me, worms' heritage — than that sun can be 

Part of the earth he has with warmth imbued, — 

Whence earnest thou ? Whither goest thou ? I, subdued 

With awe of mine own being thus sit still, 

Dumb, on the summit of this lonely hill, 

Whose dry November grasses dew-bestrewed 

Mirror a million suns. That sun so bright, 

Passes, as thou must pass, Soul, into night. 

Art thou afraid who solitary hast trod 

A path I know not, from a source to a bourn 

Both which I know not ? Fearest thou to return 

Alone, even as thou earnest alone, to God ? 

D. M. Mulock. 

Insect and reptile, fish and bird and beast, 

Cast their worn robes aside, fresh robes to don; 
Tree, flower, and moss, put new year's raiments on; 

Each natural type, the greatest as the least, 

Renews its vesture when its use hath ceased. 
How should man's spirit keep in unison 
With the world's law of outgrowth, save it won 

New robes and ampler as its girth increased ? 

Quit shrunken creed, and dwarfed philosophy ! 
Let gently die an art's decaying fire ! 

Work on the ancient lines, but yet be free 
To leave and frame anew, if God inspire ! 

The planets change their surface as they roll : 

The force that binds the spheres must bind the soul. 

Henry G. Hewlett. 



PREFACE, 



" The idea of a transmigration of souls has hitherto 
remained a dream of the fancy, nor has any one yet 
succeeded in giving it a higher moral significance 
for the order of the universe." So writes Hermann 
Lotze, the German philosopher, in his magnificent 
" Microcosm," expressing the common feeling of 
Christendom. If this little book achieves its purpose 
it will show the strength and value of that dreamy 
idea. 

The present perplexity of all Christendom upon the 
deepest problems of life, the sense of blind fate op- 
pressing mankind, the despairing restlessness of many 
leading poets, the absence of sublime ideals in art, 
the prevalence of materialism and agnosticism (if not 
in philosophy, in the most vital form of practical 
life), all feed a flood-tide of dissatisfaction which 
Christianity tries in vain to resist, and indicate that 
the West deeply needs some new truth. Not only 
the wavering masses of men, but many of those un- 
compromising devotees of truth who dare surrender 
themselves, like St. Christopher, to the mightiest, are 
yearning after a larger revelation. A portion of this 



vm PREFACE. 

is contained, we believe, in the doctrine variously 
termed as Reincarnation, Metempsychosis, Transmi- 
gration. By this we do not mean the theories con- 
cerning re-birth of men in brute bodies, which are 
attributed to oriental religions and philosophies be- 
cause popularly accepted by their followers. These 
are crude caricatures of the true conception. They 
represent the reality as absurdly as ordinary life in 
Europe and America illustrates the teaching of Jesus. 
But we mean the inner kernel of that husk, which in 
protean forms has irrepressibly welled up in every 
great phase of thought, which is an open secret lying 
all around us and not simply a foreign importation, 
and which Christendom cannot afford to lose. 

For those who are content with the usual creeds 
this little work will have no attraction. They may 
be pleased to regard it as a heathen invasion of Chris- 
tendom. But for truth-seekers it may prove useful, 
though it claims only to be an earnest investigation 
of what seems an undemonstrable proposition. Its 
doctrine was first met as the declaration of the pro- 
foundest students of the mysteries enveloping hu- 
manity — coming with authority but no proof of 
weight to most western thinkers. Its violent antago- 
nism to current ideas compelled the writer to dispose 
of it by independent methods. If true, there must 
be some confirmation of it such as will impress any 
candid mind. If false, nothing can force it to live. 
This led to a careful study of the subject, which was 
summarized in a brief essay read and published to 



PREFACE. IX 

a small circle of Theosophists. A continuation of 
that study has resulted in this volume. Some readers 
will regard it as a waste of energy, except as a divert- 
ing curiosity, the truth or falsehood of reincarnation 
being to them of little consequence. But a sincere 
motive underlies it. For reincarnation illuminates 
the darkest passages in the murky road of life, dis- 
pels many haunting enigmas and illusions, and re- 
veals cardinal principles which, if apprehended, will 
steady the shambling gait of mankind. Virtue, kind- 
liness, and spirituality may thus be seen in their un- 
veiled splendor as the only proper modes of action 
and thought. The noblest life is discerned to be the 
only sensible kind, and not abandoned to the accidental 
expression of impulse or sentiment. The cause of all 
the evils of modern society, the parent of the revolu- 
tions of Europe, the source of the labor disturbances 
aggravating America, is the arch-enemy of the race — 
materialism. Reincarnation combats that foe by a 
most subtle and deadly warfare. 

The sincere thanks of the writer are due to a num- 
ber of kind friends, whose assistance has largely facil- 
itated the collection of materials for this book, and 
also to the authors who have kindly permitted the 
use of extracts from their writings, (in chapters iv 
and v.) 

E. D. W. 



Of all the theories respecting' the origin of the soul, it (pre-exist- 
ence) seems to me the most plausible and therefore the one most like- 
ly to throw light on the question of a life to come. — Frederick H. 
Hedge. 

It would he curious if we should find science and philosophy tak- 
ing up again the old theory of metempsychosis, remodelling it to 
suit our present modes of religious and scientific thought, and launch- 
ing it again on the wide ocean of human belief. But stranger things 
have happened in the history of human opinion. — James Freeman 
Clarke. 

If we could legitimately determine any question of belief by the 
number of its adherents, the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omni- 
bus would apply to metempsychosis more fitly than to any other. 
I think it is quite as likely to be revived and to come to the front 
again as any rival theory. — Professor William Knight. 

It seems to me, a firm and well-grounded faith in the doctrine of 
Christian metempsychosis might help to regenerate the world. For 
it would be a faith not hedged round with many of the difficulties 
and objections which beset other forms of doctrine, and it offers dis- 
tinct and pungent motives for trying to lead a more Christian life, 
and for loving and helping our brother-man. — Professor Francis 
Bowen. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction 3 

I. 

What is Reincarnation? « 9 

II. 

Western Evidences of Reincarnation 15 

1. Immortality demands it ; 2. Analogy suggests it ; 3. Science 
confirms it ; 4. The nature of the soul requires it ; 5. It 
answers the theological question of ' ' original sin ' ' and 
"future punishment;" 6. Many strange experiences are 
explained hy it ; 7. The problems of life and of Nemesis 
are solved best by it. 

m. 

Western Objections to Reincarnation . . 49 

1 We have no memory of past lives ; 2. It is unjust for us 
to receive the results of forgotten deeds ; 3. Heredity op- 
poses it ; 4. It is an uncongenial doctrine. 

IV. 

Western Authors upon Reincarnation ....... 63 

Extracts: 1. Schopenhauer; 2. Lessing ; 3 Fichte ; 4. Her- 
der ; 5. Henry More ; 6. Sir Thomas Browne ; 7. Cheva- 
lier Ramsay ; 8. Soame Jenyns ; 9. Joseph Glanvil ; 10. 
Dowden's Shelley; 11. Hume; 12. Southey; 13. Wil- 
liam Blake; 14. William Knight ; 15. W.A.Butler; 16. 
Bulwer; 17. Pezzani; 18. Emerson; 19. James Freeman 
Clarke ; 20. William R. Alger ; 21. Francis Bowen ; 22. 
Frederick H. Hedge ; 23. Sir Humphry Davy. 



xii CONTENTS. 

V. 

Western Poets upon Reincarnation 

I. American Poets : Hayne, Whittier, Taylor, Landon, 
Leland, Thompson, Willis, Trowbridge, Longfellow, 
Whitman, Parsons. 

II. British Poets : Wordsworth, Gosse, Alford, Millies, Tenny- 

son, Rossetti, Addison, Bailey, Sharp, Tupper, Browning, 
Leyden, Coleridge, Miss Tatham, Dr. Donne, Collins, 
Matthew Arnold. 

III. Continental Poets : Boyesen, Hugo, B^ranger, Goethe, 
Schiller, Campanella. 

IV. Platonic Poets: More, Milton, Anonymous, Shelley, 
Vaughan, Emerson, Mrs. Rowe, Hymns. 

VI. 

Reincarnation among the Ancients 193 

I. Brahmans; II. Egyptians; III. Pythagoras; IV- Plato; 
V. The Jews. 

VII. 
Reincarnation in the Bible 213 

VIII. 

Reincarnation in Early Christendom 223 

I. The Gnostics ; II. The Neo-Platonists ; III. The Orthodox 
Church Fathers. 

IX 

Reincarnation in the East To-day 239 

I. Brahmanism; II. Buddhism; III. Zoroastrianism and Su- 
fism. 

X. 

Eastern Poetry of Reincarnation 249 

Extracts: 1. Kalid^sa's " Sakoontala ; " 2. The Katha Upani- 
shad; 3. The Light of Asia; 4. A Persian Poem; 5. 
From Hafiz ; 6. A Sufi Poem. 

XI. 
Esoteric Oriental Reincarnation 261 



CONTENTS. 

XII. 
Transmigration through Animals 

XIII. 
Death, Heaven, and Hell, What then of ? . . 

XIV. 
Karma, the Companion Truth of Reincarnation 

XV. 
Conclusion • . 

APPENDIX. 
Bibliography of Reincarnation . ...... 

Index •...>.. 



By the sea, by the dreary darkening sea 

There stands a youthful man. 
His frame is throbbing with doubt's agony, 

His lips move sadly and wan. 

Oh, solve me Life's enigma, ye waves, 

The torturing riddle of old 
With which the mind of humanity raves, 

Whose answer is never told ; 

The mystery hidden from hoary sage, 

From soldier, saint, and king ; 
From wisest heads in every age, 

Weary and languishing 

For light upon the misty road. 

Tell me, what am I ? 
Whence came I, whither do I plod ? 

Who dwells in the blazing sky ? 

The billows murmur ceaselessly, 

The wind speaks night and day, 
Calm and cold sing the stars on high, 

But he knows not what they say. 

Heine. 

?ine of metempsychosis may almost claim to be a natural 
lief in the human mind, if we may judge from its wide 
long the nations of the earth and its prevalence throughout 
il ages. — Professor Francis Bo wen. 



INTRODUCTION. 



We sow the glebe, we reap the corn, 

We build the house where we may rest, 
And then, at moments, suddenly, 
We look up to the great wide sky. 
Enquiring wherefore we were born, — 
For earnest, or for jest ? 

The senses folding thick and dark 

About the stifled soul within, 
We guess diviner things beyond, 
And yearn to them with yearning fond ; 
We strike out boldly to a mark 

Believed in, but not seen. 

And sometimes horror chills our blood 

To be so near such mystic things, 
And we wrap round us, for defence, 
Our purple manners, moods of sense, — 
As angels, from the face of God, 
Stand hidden in their wings. 

Mbs. Browning. 



INTRODUCTION. 

Once the whole civilized world embraced reincar- 
nation, and found therein a complete answer to that 
riddle of man's descent and destiny which the inex- 
orable sphinx Life propounds to every traveler along 
her way. But the western branch of the race, in 
working out the material conquest of the world, has 
acquired the compensating discontent of a material 
philosophy. It has lost the old faith and drifted into 
a shadowy region, where the eagerness for " practical " 
things rejects whatever cannot be physically proven. 
Even God and immortality are for the most part con- 
jectures, believed only after demonstration, and not 
vitally then. The realization of this condition is pro- 
voking throughout Christendom a counter-current of 
spirituality. The growing freedom of thought and 
the eastward look of many leading minds seem to 
herald a renaissance more radical, although more 
subtle and gradual, than the reformations of Columbus, 
Luther, and Guthenberg. As surely as the occupation 
and development of the western Eldorado revived 
Europe into unprecedented vigor, the exploration of 
Palestine, and beyond into India, for treasures more 
precious than gold and dominion, shall revitalize the 
West with an unparalleled growth of spiritual power. 

Strangely enough, too, just as the " New World " 
proved to be geologically the oldest continent, so the 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

" new truths " recently discovered are found to be the 
most ancient. They are as universal as the ocean, 
always waiting to be used. The latest philosophies 
and heterodoxies are only fresh phrasings of early 
ideas. The most advanced conceptions of art, educa- 
tion, and government are essentially identical with 
those of Greece and Rome. The newest industries 
are approaching the lost arts of Egypt. The modern 
sciences (as electricity and chemistry) are merely 
ingenious applications of what the schoolmasters of 
the primitive races knew better in some respects than 
Edison and Cooke. Geology has just dawned upon us 
to reveal the - sublime synopsis of earth's history hid- 
den for over three thousand years in the first chapter 
of the Bible. The last great thought of this era — 
Evolution — is as old as the hills in the East. Profes- 
sor Crookes's wonderful experiments connected with 
the instability of certain elements, psychic force, and 
the fourth dimension of matter (so far in advance of 
present scientific culture that many physicists deride 
them) are stumblings upon the outskirts of a domain 
long familiar to oriental students. After many cen- 
turies of tedious jangling with creeds and sects, we are 
slowly learning that primitive Christianity will make 
earth a paradise. The permanent edifice of the world's 
complete education seems to patiently await the time 
when men shall tire of fashioning useless building 
stuff from their crumbling theories and revert to the 
basal granite of which the everlasting foundations are 
laid, caring only to shape the superstructure by the 
Architect's plan. 

Although commonly rejected throughout Europe 
and America, reincarnation is unreservedly accepted 
by the majority of mankind at the present day, as in 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

all the past centuries. From the dawn of history it 
has prevailed among the largest part of humanity 
with an unshaken intensity of conviction. Over all 
the mightiest eastern nations it has held permanent 
sway. The ancient civilization of Egypt, whose gran- 
deur cannot be overestimated, was built upon this as 
a fundamental truth, and taught it as a precious secret 
to Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, Virgil, and Ovid, 
who scattered it through Greece and Italy. It is the 
keynote of Plato's philosophy, being stated or implied 
very frequently in his dialogues. "Soul is older 
than body," he says. " Souls are continually born 
over again from Hades into this life." In his view 
all knowledge is reminiscence. To search and learn 
is simply to revive the images of what the soul saw 
in its preexistent state in the world of realities. It 
was also widely spread in the Neo-Platonism of Plo- 
tinus and Proclus. The swarming millions of India 
have made this thought the foundation of their enor- 
mous achievements in government, architecture, phi- 
losophy, and poetry. It was a cardinal element in 
the religion of the Persian Magi. Alexander the 
Great gazed in amazement on the self-immolation by 
fire to which it inspired the Gymnosophists. Caesar 
found its tenets propagated among the Gauls. The 
circle of metempsychosis was an essential principle 
of the Druid faith, and as such was impressed upon 
our forefathers the Celts, the Gauls, and the Britons. 
It is claimed that the people held this doctrine so 
vitally that they wept around the new-born infant 
and smiled upon death ; for the beginning and end of 
an earthly life were to them the imprisonment and 
release of a soul, which must undergo repeated proba- 
tions to remove its degrading impurities for final ascent 



b INTRODUCTION. 

into a succession of higher spheres. The Bardic triads 
of the Welsh are replete with this thought, and a 
Welsh antiquary insists that an ancient emigration 
from Wales to India conveyed it to the Brahmans. 
Among the Arab philosophers it was a favorite idea, 
and it still may be noticed in many Mohammedan 
writers. In the old civilizations of Peru and Mexico 
it prevailed universally. The priestly rites of the 
Egyptian Isis, the Eleusinian mysteries of Greece, the 
Bacchic processions of Rome, the Druid ceremonies of 
Britain, and the Cabalic rituals of the Hebrews, all 
expressed this great truth with peculiar force for their 
initiated witnesses. The Jews generally adopted it 
after the Babylonian captivity through the Pharisees, 
Philo of Alexandria, and the doctors. John the 
Baptist was to them a second Elijah. Jesus was com- 
monly thought to be a reappearance of John the Bap- 
tist or of one of the old prophets. The Talmud and 
the Cabala are full of the same teaching. Some of 
the late Rabbins assert many entertaining things con- 
cerning the repeated births of the most noted persons 
of their nation. Christianity is not an exception to 
all the other great religions in promulgating the same 
philosophy. Reincarnation played an important part 
in the thought of Origen and several other leaders 
among the early Church Fathers. It was a main por- 
tion of the creed of the Gnostics and Manichseans. In 
the Middle Ages many scholastics and heretical sects 
advocated it. It has cropped out spontaneously in many 
western theologians. The elder English divines do 
not hesitate to inculcate preexistence in their sermons. 
In the seventeenth century Dr. Henry More and 
other Cambridge Platonists gave it wide acceptance. 
The Roman Catholic Purgatory seems to be a make- 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

shift improvised to take its place. Sir Harry Vane is 
said by Burnet to have maintained this doctrine. 

Many philosophers of metaphysical depth, like 
Scotus, Kant, Schelling, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, and 
the younger Fichte, have upheld reincarnation. Gen- 
iuses of noble symmetry, like Giordano Bruno, Herder, 
Lessing, and Goethe, have fathered it. Scientists 
like Flammarion, Figuier, and Brewster have ear- 
nestly advocated it. Theological leaders like Julius 
Miiller, Dorner, Ernesti, Riickert, and Edward 
Beecher have maintained it. In exalted intuitional 
natures like Boehme and Swedenborg its hold is ap- 
parent. Most of the mystics bathe in it. Of course 
the long line of Platonists from Socrates down to 
Emerson have no doubt of it. Nearly all the poets 
profess it. 

Even amid the predominance of materialistic in- 
fluences in Christendom it has a considerable follow- 
ing. Traces of it are found among the aborigines of 
North and South America, and in many barbaric tribes. 
At this time it reigns without any sign of decrepitude- 
over the Burman, Chinese, Japanese, Tartar, Thibe- 
tan, and East Indian nations, including at least 
750,000,000 of mankind and nearly two thirds of the 
race. Throughout the East it is the great central 
thought. It is no mere superstition of the ignorant 
masses. It is the chief principle of Hindu metaphys- 
ics, — the basis of all their inspired books. Such a 
hoary philosophy, held by the venerable authority of 
ages, ruling from the beginning of time the bulk of 
the world's thought, cherished in some form by the 
disciples of every great religion, is certainly worthy of 
the profoundest respect and study. There must be 
some vital reality inspiring so stupendous an exist- 
ence, 



8 9 INTRODUCTION. 

But the western fondness for democracy does not 
hold in the domain of thought. The fact that the 
majority of the race has agreed upon reincarnation is 
no argument for it to an occidental thinker. The 
conceit of modern progress has no more respect for 
ancient ideas than for the forgotten civilization of old, 
even though in many essentials they anticipated or 
outstripped all that we boast of. Therefore we pro- 
pose to treat this subject largely from a western 
standpoint. 



WHAT IS REINCARNATION? 



We cannot yet have learned all that we are meant to learn through 
the body. How much of the teaching even of this world can the 
most diligent and most favored man have exhausted before he is called 
to leave it. Is all that remains lost ? — George Macdonald. 

You cannot say of the soul, it shall be, or is about to be, or is to be 
hereafter. It is a thing without birth. — Bhagavad Gita. 

As the inheritance of an illustrious name and pedigree quickens 
the sense of duty in every noble nature, a belief in preexistence may 
enhance the glory of the present life and intensify the reverence with 
which the deathless principle is regarded. — William Knight. 

If we except the belief of a future remuneration beyond this life 
for suffering virtue and retribution for successful crimes, there is no 
system so simple, and so little repugnant to our understanding, as that 
of metempsychosis. The pains and pleasures of this life are by this 
system considered as the recompense or the punishment of our actions 
in another state. — Isaac D' Israeli. 

The experiences gained in one life may not be remembered in their 
details in the next, but the impressions which they produce will re- 
main. Again and again man passes through the wheel of transforma- 
tion, changing his lower energies into higher ones, until matter at- 
tracts him no longer, and he becomes — what he is destined to be — 
a god. — Hartmann. 



As billows on the undulating main 
That swelling fall, and falling swell again, 
So on the tide of time incessant roll 
The dying body and the deathless soul. 



I. 

WHAT IS REINCARNATION? 

Reincarnation is an extremely simple doctrine 
rooted in the assurance of the soul's indestructibility. 
It explains at once the descent and the destiny of the 
soul by so natural and forcible a method that it has 
not only dominated the ingenuous minds of all the 
primitive races, but has become the most widely 
spread and most permanently influential of all phi- 
losophies. 

Reincarnation teaches that the soul enters this life, 
not as a fresh creation, but after a long course of pre- 
vious existences on this earth and elsewhere, in which 
it acquired its present inhering peculiarities, and 
that it is on the way to future transformations which 
the soul is now shaping. It claims that infancy 
brings to earth, not a blank scroll for the beginning 
of an earthly record, nor a mere cohesion of atomic 
forces into a brief personality soon to dissolve again 
into the elements, but that it is inscribed with ances- 
tral histories, some like the present scene, most of 
them unlike it and stretching back into the remotest 
past. These inscriptions are generally undecipherable, 
save as revealed in their moulding influence upon the 
new career ; but like the invisible photographic images 
made by the sun of all it sees, when they are properly 



12 WHAT IS REINCARNATION? 

developed in the laboratory of consciousness they will 
be distinctly displayed. The current phase of life will 
also be stored away in the secret vaults of memory, for 
its unconscious effect upon the ensuing lives. All the 
qualities we now possess, in body, mind and soul, re- 
sult from our use of ancient opportunities. We are 
indeed " the heirs of all the ages," and are alone 
responsible for our inheritances. For these conditions 
accrue from distant causes engendered by our older 
selves, and the future flows by the divine law of 
cause and effect from the gathered momentum of our 
past impetuses. There is no favoritism in the uni- 
verse, but all have the same everlasting facilities for 
growth. Those who are now elevated in worldly sta- 
tion may be sunk in humble surroundings in the fu- 
ture. Only the inner traits of the soul are permanent 
companions. The wealthy sluggard may be the beg- 
gar of the next life ; and the industrious worker of 
the present is sowing the seeds of future greatness. 
Suffering bravely endured now will produce a treasure 
of patience and fortitude in another life; hardships 
will give rise to strength ; self-denial must develop 
the will ; tastes cultivated in this existence will some- 
how bear fruit in coming ones ; and acquired energies 
will assert themselves whenever they can by the lex 
parsimonies upon which the principles of physics are 
based. Vice versa, the unconscious habits, the un- 
controllable impulses, the peculiar tendencies, the fa- 
vorite pursuits, and the soul-stirring friendships of the 
present descend from far-reaching previous activities. 
Science explains the idiosyncrasies of plants and 
animals by the environment of previous generations 
and calls instinct hereditary habit. In the same way- 
there is an evolution of individuality, by which the 



WHAT IS REINCARNATION? 13 

child opens its new era with characteristics derived 
from anterior lives, and adds the experience of a new 
personality to the sum total of his treasured traits. 
In its passage through earthly personalities the spirit- 
ual self, the essential Ego> accumulates a fund of in- 
dividual character which remains as the permanent 
thread stringing together the separate lives. The 
soul is therefore an eternal water globule, which sprang 
in the beginningless past from mother ocean, and 
is destined after an unreckonable course of meander- 
ings in cloud and rain, snow and steam, spring and 
river, mud and vapor, to at last return with the 
garnered experience of all lonely existences into the 
central Heart of all. Or rather, it is the crystal 
stream running from a heavenly fountain through one 
continuous current that often halts in favorite cor- 
ners, sunny pools, and shady nooks, muddy ponds and 
clearest lakes, each delay shifting the direction and al- 
tering the complexion of the next tide as it issues out 
by the path of least resistance. 

That we have forgotten the causes producing the 
present sequence of pleasures and pains, talents and 
defects, successes and failures, is no disproof of them, 
and does not disturb the justice of the scheme. For 
temporary oblivion is the anodyne by which the kindly 
physician is bringing us through the darker wards of 
sorrow into perfect health. 

We do not undertake to trace the details of our 
earlier stoppages further than is indicated in the un- 
controvertible principle, that as long as the soul is 
governed by material desires it must find its homes in 
physical realms, and when its inclination is purely 
spiritual it certainly will inhabit the domain of spirit. 
The restless wandering of all souls must at last con- 



14 WHAT IS REINCARNATION? 

elude in the peace of God, but that will not be pos- 
sible until they have gone through all the rounds of 
experience and learned that only in that Goal is satis- 
faction. That men ever dwell in bodies of beasts, we 
deny as irrational, as such a retrogression would con- 
tradict the fundamental maxims of nature. That 
philosophy is a corruption of Reincarnation, in which 
the masses have coarsely masked the truth. 

Granting the permanence of the human spirit amid 
every change, the doctrine of rebirth is the only one 
yielding a metaphysical explanation of the phenomena 
of life. It is already accepted in the physical plane 
as evolution, and holds a firm ethical value in apply- 
ing the law of justice to human experience. In con- 
firmation of it there stands the strongest weight of 
evidence, argumentary, empirical, and historic. It 
untangles the knotty problem of life simply and 
grandly. It meets the severest requirements of en- 
lightened reason, and is in deepest harmony with the 
spirit of Christianity. 



II. 

WESTERN EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 



The house of life hath many chambers. — Rossetti. 

The soul is not born ; it does not die ; it was not produced from 
any one ; nor was any produced from it. — Emerson. 

For men to tell how human life began 

Is hard : for who himself beginning knew. 

Milton. 

There is surely a piece of divinity in us, — something that was be- 
fore the elements and owes no homage unto the sun. 

Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end. — Sir 
Thomas Browne. 

For of the soul the body form doth take, 
For soul is form and doth the body make. 

Spenser. 

Secreted and hidden in the heart of the world and the heart of 
man is the light which can illumine all life, the future and the past. 

Through the Gates of Gold. 

The soul, if immortal, existed before our birth. 
What is incorruptible must be ungenerable. 

Metempsychosis is the only system of immortality that Philosophy 
can hearken to. — Hume. 

Nature is nothing less than the ladder of resurrection which, step 
by step, leads upward, — or rather is carried from the abyss of eter- 
nal death up to the apex of life. — Schlegel. 

Look nature through ; 'tis revolution all, 

All change ; no death. Day follows night, and night 

The dying day ; stars rise and set, and set and rise. 

Earth takes the example. All to reflourish fades 

As in a wheel : all sinks to reascend ; 

Emblems of man, who passes, not expires. 

Young. 

The blending of mind and matter in the bodily structure of the 
sentient and rational orders, we may be assured, is a method of pro- 
cedure which, if it be not absolutely indispensable to the final pur- 
poses of the creation, subserves the most important ends and carries 
with it consequences such as will make it the general, if not the uni- 
versal law of all finite natures, in all worlds. — Isaac Taylor. 



II. 



WESTERN EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 



The old Saxon chronicler, Bede, records that at 
banquet given by King Edwin of Northumbria to h : 
nobles, a discussion arose as to how they should r< 
ceive the Christian missionary Paulinus, who had ju 
arrived from the continent. Some urged the suf 
ciency of their own Druid and Norse religions ar 
advised the death of the invading heretic. Othe 
were in favor of hearing his message. At length tl 
king asked the opinion of his oldest counsellor. T] 
sage arose and said : " O king and lords. You i 
did remark the swallow which entered this festal h; 
to escape the chilling winds without, fluttering ne 
the fire for a few moments and then vanishing throu] 
the opposite window. Such is the life of ma 
Whence it came and whither it goes none can te 
Therefore if this new religion brings light upon 
great a mystery, it must be diviner than ours a 
should be welcomed." The old man's advice w 
adopted. 

We are in the position of those old ancestors 
ours. The religion of the churches, called Christian! 
is to many earnest souls a dry husk. The germim 
kernel of truth as it came from the founder of Chi 
tianity, when it is discovered under all its ban 



LS evidences of reincarnation. 

vrappings, is indeed sufficient to feed us with the 

>read of life. It answers all the practical needs of 

aost people even with the husks. But it leaves some 

ital questions unanswered which impel us to desire 

Dmething more than Jesus taught — not for mere 

iriosity, but as food for larger growth. The divine 

,w which promises to fill every vacuum, and to grat- 

y at last every aspiration, has not left us without 

eans of grasping a portion of these grander truths. 

The commonest idea of the soul throughout Chris- 

ndom seems to be that it is created specially for 

rth on this world, and after its lifetime here it goes 

a permanent spiritual realm of infinite continuance. 

lis is a very comfortable belief derived from the ap- 

arances of things, and those holding it may very 

3perly say, " My view agrees with the phenomena, 

I if you think differently the burden of proof rests 

on you." We accept this responsibility. But a 

•eful observer knows that the true explanation of 

ts is as a rule very different from the appearance. 

Ilemy thought he could account for all the heavenly 
ions on his geocentric theory, and his teachings 
e at once received by his contemporaries. But the 
per studies of Copernicus and Galileo had to wait 
jntury before they were accepted, although they in- 
luced an astronomy of immeasurably nobler scale. 
t not a relic of the old confidence in appearances 
onsider the physical orbits of human souls as lim- 
to our little view of them ? 

he theologian seeks to explain life, with its in- 
lities, its miseries and injustices, by a future con- 
n rewarding and punishing men for the deeds of 
1. He concedes that benevolence and justice can- 
)e proven in God by what is seen of His earthly 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 19 

administration. The final law of creation is said to 
be Love, but the §}a and suffering bequeathed to most 
of the race through no apparent fault of theirs annuls 
that dictum in the world's real thought, and compels 
men to regard life as a ceaseless struggle for existence 
in which the strongest wins and the weakest fails, and 
the devil takes the hinder most. But even if the 
future life will straighten out this by a just judg- 
ment, fairness demands that all shall have an even 
chance here, — which only reincarnation assures. 

The materialist takes a more plausible ground. 
On the basis of the soul beginning with the present 
existence, he regards all the developments of life as 
results of blind natural forces. He says that the va- 
riety of atomic qualities accounts for all the diver- 
gencies of life, physical, mental, and moral. But he 
can give no reason why the same particles of matter 
should accomplish such stupendous varieties. More- 
over Science, the materialist's gospel, instead of dis- 
posing of psychic facts, is studying and classifying 
them as a new branch of supersensuous knowledge. l 
These investigations will ultimately initiate Science 
into the surety of non-physical things. Already a 
strong advance in that direction has been made by 
Isaac Taylor's " Physical Theory of a Future Life " 
and Stewart & Tait's " Unseen Universe." The con- 
ception of an Infinite Personality overwhelms all the 
narrow groove-thinking of every mechanical school, 
and rises supremely in the strongest scientific philos- 
ophy of all time — that of Herbert Spencer. Stran- 
gest of all, Evolution, the cornerstone of Spencerian 
philosophy, is merely a paraphrase of reincarnation. 

1 See the publications of the Society of Psychical Research of Lon- 
don and Boston and New York. 



20 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

There are seven arguments for Reincarnation which 
seem conclusive. 

1. That the idea of immortality demands it. 

2. That analogy makes it the most probable. 

3. That science confirms it. 

4. That the nature of the soul requires it. 

5. That it most completely answers the theologi- 
cal questions of " original sin " and " future punish- 
ment." 

6. That it explains many mysterious experiences* 

7. That it alone solves the problem of injustice and 
misery which broods over our world. 



1. Immortality demands it. 

Only the positivists and some allied schools of 
thought, comprising a very small proportion of Chris- 
tendom, doubt the immortality of the soul. But a 
conscious existence after death has no better proof 
than a pre-natal existence. It is an old declaration 
that what begins in time must end in time. We have 
no right to say that the soul is eternal on one side of 
its earthly period without being so on the ether. Far 
more rational is the view of certain scientists who, 
believing that the soul originates with this life, also 
declare that it ends with this life. That is the logical 
outcome of their premise. If the soul sprang into ex- 
istence specially for this life, why should it continue 
afterward ? It is precisely as probable from all the 
grounds of reason that death is the conclusion of the 
soul as that birth is the beginning of it. As Cudworth 
points out, it was this argument which had special 
weight with the Greek philosophers, whose reasonings 
upon immortality have led all later generations. They 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 21 

asserted the eternity of the soul in order to vindicate 
its immortality. For, they held, as nothing which has 
being can have originated from nothingness, or can 
vanish into nothingness, and as they were certain ot 
their existence, it was impossible that they could have 
had a temporal beginning. The present life must be 
only one stage of a vast number, stretching backward 
and forward. 

Oar instinctive belief in immortality implies a sub- 
conscious acceptance of this view. W.e are certain 
of a persevering life outlasting all the changes of time 
and death. But birth, as well as death, is one of the 
temporal shifts belonging to the transitory sphere 
which is foreign to our spirits. It is only because our 
backs are toward the earlier change and our faces to 
the later that we refuse to reason about one on the 
principles used about the other. If we lived in the re- 
versed world of Fechner's " Dr. Mises," in which old 
things grow new and men begin life by a reversed 
dying and end by a reversed birth, we would probably 
devise arguments for preexistence as zealously as we 
do now for future existence, and that would lead to 
reincarnation. For all the indications of immortality 
point as unfailingly to an eternity preceding this ex- 
istence : the love of prolonged life ; the analogy of 
nature; the prevailing belief of the most spiritual 
minds ; the permanence of the ego principle ; the in- 
conceivability of annihilation or of creation from 
nothing ; the promise of an extension of the present 
career ; the injustice of any other thought. 

The ordinary Christian idea of special creation at 
birth involves the correlative of annihilation at death. 
What the origin of the soul may have been does not 
affect this subject, further than that it long antedates 



22 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

the present life. Whether it be a spark from God 
himself, or a divine emanation, or a cluster of inde- 
pendent energies, its eternal destiny compels the in- 
ference that it is uncreated and indestructible. More- 
over, it is unthinkable that from an infinite history it 
enters this world for its first and only physical experi- 
ence and then shoots off to an endless spiritual exist- 
ence. The deduction is rather that it assumed many 
forms before it appeared as we now see it, and is 
bound to pass through many coming lives before it 
will be rounded into the full orb of perfection and 
reach its ultimate goal. 

2c Analogy is strongly in favor of reincarnation. 
Were Bishop Butler to work out the problem of the 
career of the human soul in the light of modern 
science, we doubt not that his masterpiece would ad- 
vocate this "pagan" thought. For many centuries 
the literature of nations has discerned a standard 
simile of the soul's deathlessness in the transformation 
of the caterpillar into the butterfly. But it is known 
now that once all the caterpillars and butterflies were 
alike, and that by repeated incarnations they have 
reached the bewildering differences. When they 
started off from the procession of life on their own road 
from one or a few similar species, the progeny scat- 
tered into various circumstances, and the struggles and 
devices which they went through for their own pur- 
poses, being repeated for thousands of years in millions 
of lives, has developed the surprising heterogeneity of 
feather-winged insects. And as each undergoes his 
rapid changes in rehearsal of his long pedigree, we 
may trace the succession of his earlier lives. 

The violent energy of the present condition argues 
a previous stage leading up to it. It is contended 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 23 

with great force of analogy that death is but another 
and higher birth. This life is a groping embryo plane 
implying a more exalted one. Mysterious intimations 
reach us from a diviner sphere, — 

" Like hints and echoes of the world 
To spirits folded in the womb." 

But subtle indications rearward argue that birth is the 
death of an earlier existence. Even the embryo life 
necessitates a preparatory one preceding it. So com- 
plete a structure must have a foundation. So swift a 
momentum must have traveled far. As Emerson ob- 
serves : " We wake and find ourselves on a stair. 
There are other stairs below us which we seem to have 
ascended ; there are stairs above us, many a one, which 
go upward and out of sight." 

The grand order of creation is everywhere proclaim- 
ing as the universal word, "change." Nothing is de- 
stroyed, but all is passing from one existence to an- 
other. Not an atom but is dancing in lively march 
from its present condition to a different form, running 
a ceaseless cycle through mineral, vegetable, and ani- 
mal existence, though never losing its individuality, 
however diverse its apparent alterations. Not a crea- 
ture but is constantly progressing to something else. 
The tadpole becomes a fish, the fish a frog, and some 
of the frogs have turned to birds. It was the keen 
perception of this principle in nature which gave their 
vital force to the Greek mythologies and other ancient 
stories embodying the idea of transmutation of per- 
sonality through many guises. It was this which ani- 
mated the metamorphoses of Ovid, whose philosophy 
is contained in these lines from his poem on Pytha- 
goras : — 



24 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

" Death, so called, is but old matter dressed 
In some new form. And in a varied vest 
From tenement to tenement, though tossed, 
The soul is still the same, the figure only lost : 
And, as the softened wax new seals receives, 
This face assumes, and that impression leaves, 
Now called by one, now by another name, 
The form is only changed, the wax is still the same. 
Then, to be born is to begin to be 
Some other thing we were not formerly. 
That forms are changed, I grant ; that nothing can 
Continue in the figure it began." x 

Evolution has remoulded the thought of Christen- 
dom, expanding our conception of physiology, astron- 
omy and history. The more it is studied the more 
universal is found its application. It seems to be 
the secret of God's life. Now that we know the evo- 
lution of the body, it is time that we learned the evo- 
lution of the soul. The biologist shows that each of 
us physically before birth runs through all the phases 
of animal life — polyp, fish, reptile, dog, ape, and 
man — as a brief synopsis of how the ages have pre- 
pared our tenements. The preponderance of special 
animal traits in us is due, he says, to the emphasis of 
those particular stages of our physical growth. So in 
infancy does the soul move through an unconscious 
series of existences, recapitulating its long line of de- 
scent, until it is fastened in maturity. And why is it 
not true that our soul traits are the relics of former 
activities? Evolution proves that the physical part 
of man is the product of a long series of changes, in 
which each stage is both the effect of past influences 
and the cause of succeeding issues. Does not the im- 
material part of man require a development equally 
1 Dryden's Translation. 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 25 

vast ? The fact of an intellectual and moral evolution 
proceeding hand in hand with the physical can only 
be explained under the economy of nature by a series 
of reincarnations. 

3. Furthermore, the idea that the soul is specially 
created for introduction into this world combats all 
the principles of science. All nature proceeds on the 
strictest economic methods. Nothing is either lost or 
added. There is no creation or destruction. What- 
ever appears to spring suddenly into existence is de- 
rived from some sufficient cause — although as un- 
seen as the vapor currents which feed the clouds. 
There is a growing consensus of opinion among spirit- 
ualists and materialists alike, that the quantity both 
of force and of matter remains constant. The law of 
conservation of energy holds in the spiritual realm as 
in physics. The uniform stock of energy in the uni- 
verse neither declines nor increases, but incessantly 
changes. The marvelous developments shown in the 
protean organisms continually entering the procession 
of life indicate that the new manifestations descend 
from some patriarchal line, uncreated and immortal, 
coming through the hidden regions of previous exist- 
ences. Science allows no such miracle as the theo- 
logical special resurrection, which is contrary to all 
experience. But it recognizes the universality of re- 
surrection throughout all nature, which is a matter of 
common observation. The idea of the soul as a phoe- 
nix, eternally continuing through myriad embodiments, 
is adapted to the whole spirit of modern science. 

Especially significant is the axiomatic law of cause 
and effect. There is no other adequate explanation 
of the phenomena of life than the purely scientific 
one, that causes similar to those now operating before 



26 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

our eyes have produced the results we witness. The 
impelling characteristics of each personality require 
some earlier experiences of physical life to have gen- 
erated them. All the sensuous proclivities of human 
nature point to long earthly experience as their only 
origin. And the unsatisfied physical inclinations of 
the soul necessitate a series of material existences to 
work themselves out. The irrepressible eagerness for 
all the range of experience seems to be a sufficient 
reason for a course of incarnations which shall ac- 
complish that result. 

Physiologists contend that the wondrous human 
organism could not have grown up out of mere mat- 
ter, but implies a preexistent personal idea, 1 which 
grouped around itself the organic conditions of phys- 
ical existence and constrained the material elements 

1 We purposely use the term Personal in preference to spiritual, 
for the word should be rescued from its confusion of meanings 
to the old classical one, in connection with the soul. As Her- 
mann Lotze beautifully unfolds, " Personality is the key to ex- 
istence," using the word in its first sense from persona, a mask, 
parallel to the Hebrew analogy which calls man the image of 
Jehovah. Mulford also presents the thought grandly in The 
Republic of God and The Nation, drawing his suggestion from 
the Germans Stahl and Froshammer. In this sense human- 
ity is the shadow of Deity, the veil through which the Absolute 
tries to reveal Himself, casting about in the multiplicity of nat- 
ural forms after an expression through physical means of His 
own nature. In this sublime conception God is the life of the 
universe, who, in Schilling's phrase, "sleeps in the stone, 
breathes in the plant, moves in the animal, and wakes up to con- 
sciousness in man." It is this thought which makes Novalis so 
reverent to a human being as a Microdeus, and elevates the dig- 
nity of the soul above all else. For as the purpose of nature is 
to personify the Invisible, human souls are the Persons (or 
masks) by which the leading parts are here acted with many 
changes of scenery. 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 27 

to follow its plan. This dynamic agent — or the 
soul — must have existed independent of the body be- 
fore the receptacle was prepared. Bouiller and the 
German scientists Miiller, Hartmann, and Stahl, have 
especially demonstrated in physiology this idea of a 
preexistent soul monad, whose plastic power uncon- 
sciously constructs its own corporeal organism. The 
Greeks coiled this idea into the word ^x^a, and the 
younger Fichte and Lotze have developed it. The 
doctrine of modern physiology, as presented by the 
animists, is precisely the ground taken by upholders of 
reincarnation, — that as the lower animals fashion 
ingenious nests with incredible skill, so the unwitting- 
soul blindly frames the fabric of its body in keeping 
with the laws of its own adaptation. The unconscious 
agency of the mind or instinct in repairing the body, 
healing its hurts and guiding its growth, is recognized 
by most scientists. Plato but expresses the same 
idea when he says, " The soul always weaves her gar- 
ment anew." This thought is well worded by Gior- 
dano Bruno when he says, " The soul is not in the 
body locally, but as its intrinsic form and extrinsic 
mould, as that which makes the members and shapes 
the whole within and without. The body, then, is in 
the soul, the soul in the mind (spirit). The Intellect 
(Spirit) is God." 

This conception gives the lie to the materialism 
which limits the forces of the individual to the com- 
plications of a mechanism. A corollary of this 
moulding power of the independent soul is Plato's prop- 
osition that " the soul has a natural strength which 
will hold out and be born many times." Since the 
ego is older than the body, the resident who builds its 
dwelling according to its tastes and materials, and 



28 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

since the purpose of its corporeal habitation cannot 
possibly be accomplished in a single brief lifetime, it 
is necessary that it should repeat that experience, al- 
ways framing its receptacle to suit its growing char- 
acter, like the epochs of a lobster's enlargement, until 
it has done with physical life. The new apparitions 
of men upon the earth thus hail from older scenes. 

Evolution may fairly be claimed as a spiritual 
truth applying to all the methods of life. The gradual 
development of the soul, by the school of experience, 
demands a vaster arena of action than one earthly life 
affords. If it takes ages of time and thousands of 
lives to form one kind of an animal from another, 
the expansion of human souls from lower to higher 
natures surely needs many and many a life for that 
growth. 

Evolutionary science explains the instinctive acts 
of young animals as inherited tendencies, — as past 
experiences transmitted into fresh forms. Psychic 
science is learning that the earliest acts of human 
beings are also derived from remote habits formed in 
anterior activities, and stored away in the unconscious 
memory. Herbert Spencer, the philosopher of evolu- 
tion, speaks of a constant energy manifesting itself 
through all transformations. This is the one life 
which runs eternally in protean shapes. 

The measure of our acquisition of conceptions from 
the outer universe resides in the senses. There is no 
evidence that these have always been five. Nature, 
never taking a leap, must have put us through all the 
lower stages before she placed us at our present posi- 
tion. And since nature contains many substances 
and powers which are partially or wholly beyond 
these senses, some of which powers are known to 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 29 

other animals, we must assume that our present as- 
cending development will introduce us to higher levels 
in which the soul shall have as many senses as corre- 
spond with the powers of nature. 1 

4. A much more weighty argument is that the na- 
ture of the soul requires reincarnation. The conscious 
soul cannot feel itself to have had any beginning, any 
more than it can conceive of annihilation. The sense 
of persistence overwhelms all the interruptions of for- 
getfulness and sleep, and all the obstacles of matter. 
This incessant self-assurance suggests the idea of the 
soul being independent of the changing body, its tem- 
porary prison. Then follows the conception that, as 
the soul has once appeared in human form, so it may 
reappear in many others. The eternity of the soul, 
past and present, leads directly to an innumerable suc- 
cession of births and deaths, disembodiments and re- 
embodiments. 

The identity of the soul surely does not consist in 
a remembrance of all its past. We are always for- 
getting ourselves and waking again to recognition. 
But the sense of individuality bridges all the gaps. 
In the same way it seems as if our present existence 
were a somnambulent condition into which we have 
drowsed from an earlier life, being sleepily oblivious 
of that former activity, and from which we may after 
a while be roused into wakefulness. 

The study of infant psychology confirms this. The 
nature and extent of the mental furniture with which 

1 This idea is grandly stated in Isaac Taylor's Physical The- 
ory of a Future Life. In demonstrating the assurance that the 
future existence is in material bodies, and showing the glorious 
extensions to which the coming bodily powers will probably be 
developed, the author approaches strangely near the philosophy 
of reincarnation. 



SO EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

we begin life, apart from all experience of this world, 
has obliged many thinkers to resort to preexistence 
as the necessary explanation. 

A careful examination of the rarer facts of life, 
noticeably those found in dreams, trances, and analo- 
gous phenomena, demonstrates that our complete life 
is largely independent of the body, and consists in a 
perpetual transfer of the sensuous experiences of 
self -consciousness into a supersensuous unconscious- 
ness. But this higher storehouse of character might 
more truly be called our real consciousness, although 
we are not ordinarily cognizant of it, for it comprises 
our habits, instincts, and tendencies. This is the es- 
sential character of the soul and must persist after 
death. Now, unless all our earthly possibilities are 
exhausted in one life, these inherent material quali- 
ties of our spiritual nature will find expression in a 
plurality of earthly existences. And if the purpose 
of life be the acquisition of experience, it would be 
unreasonable to suppose a final transfer elsewhere be- 
fore a full knowledge of earth has been gained. It is 
apparent that one life cannot accomplish this, even in 
the longest and most diverse career, — to say nothing 
of the short average, and the curtailed allowance 
given to the majority. If one earth life answers for 
all, what a tiny experience suffices for the immense 
masses who prematurely die as children ! Men are 
willing enough to believe in an eternity of spiritual 
development after this world; but is it consistent 
with the thought of Omnipotence to consider that the 
Divine plan is achieved in preparing for that by a few 
swift years in one body ? In devoting eternity to our 
education, the infinite Teacher surely will not put us 
into the highest grade of all until we have well mas- 
tered the lessons of all the lower classes. 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 31 

The philosophy of "innate ideas" is an admission 
of earlier lives than the present. The intuitionalists 
emphatically regard the concepts of cause, substance, 
time, and space as existing in the mind indepen- 
dent of experience. The sensationalists consider 
them entirely due to our sensations. The Spencerian 
evolutionalists occupy a middle ground and call them 
a mental heredity resulting from the experience of 
the race. It has been well shown, as Edgar Fawcett 
says, by two impartial critics, that thb controversy 
cannot be solved by any agreement of Western psychol- 
ogists. Buckle inveighs against these discordant sys- 
tems as having " thrown the study of the mind into 
a confusion only to be compared to that in which the 
study of religion has been thrown by the controversies 
of the theologians." 1 And George Henry Lewes, in 
his " History of Philosophy," deplores this perplex- 
ing condition of metaphysics. The solution of the 
problem comes, along with reincarnation, from the 
eastern students, who assert that a true conception of 
the soul is discovered only by the culture of super- 
sensuous faculties. They concede a portion of truth 
to both extreme schools, declaring that the primary 
acquisition of such ideas was gained by sensation, but 
that at present they are innate in the infant mind. 
They are now the generalized experience of former 
existences rising again into consciousness. 

The restlessness of our spirits points to ancient 
habits of varied action. And a still more forcible in- 
dication is the diversity of character in the same per- 
son. These wavering uncertainties and contraries in 
each one of us, which strive for the mastery and are 
never crushed even by the sternest fixity of habit — 
1 H. T. Buckle, History of Civilization, vol. i. p. 166. 



32 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

rendering the best of us amenable to temptations, and 
making the strongest vacillate, may well result from 
meander ings in numerous characters. The main trend 
of our natures is still often distracted into old forgot- 
ten ways. 

5. Reincarnation provides a complete answer to 
the most perplexing problem of theology, — original 
sin. Properly this point belongs to the preceding sec- 
tion, but its importance justifies a separate mention. 
The endless controversies centering upon this question 
show how Christian metaphysics have vainly wrestled 
with a Gordian knot which cannot possibly be untied 
from the standpoint considering this life the initial and 
only earthly one, — a knot which reincarnation not 
simply cuts, but reveals how it was made. Between the 
extreme dogmas of Pelagius, who maintained that all 
men are born in a state of innocence and may therefore 
live without sin, and of Augustine, who held the total 
depravity of mankind, arising from their transgression 
in Adam and their absolute bondage to the devil, there 
has raged a continual warfare, which has divided 
Christendom into many sects of thought on this leading 
doctrine. The modern church creeds still range them- 
selves in conflicting battalions, following the discus- 
sions during the Reformation between Erasmus, who 
denied the power oi: hereditary sin over free will, and 
Luther, who insisted that the race is completely in 
the devil's power by nature. By far the largest part 
of the Christian world professedly adheres to the lat- 
ter faith, — that men are born entirely corrupt. Even 
the Arminians, Quakers, and liberal denominations 
who admit only a germ of sin in humanity are at a 
loss to account it. The ordinary theological explana- 
tion which derives our sin from the transgression of 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 33 

Adam, as apparently taught by St. Paul, although 
tacitly held by most of the churches and expressed in 
the majority of creeds, grates so severely on the inner 
consciousness and common sense that it does not 
answer the real difficulty. There is a general agree- 
ment among mankind, upon which the codes of prac- 
tical life are based, that Adam's responsibility for our 
sin is only a makeshift of the theologians : for every 
sensible man knows that no one but the individual 
himself can be blamed for his wrong-doing. Adam 
is accepted as a fable for our older selves. Dismissing 
all the interminable arguments of theology, which only 
obscure truth in a cloud of intellectual wranglings, 
the broad foundation of ethics, grounded in our best 
instincts, attached sin somehow, though inexplainably, 
to the sinner; and the only sufficient explanation 
traces its beginnino' to earlier lives. 

The moral character of children, especially the oc- 
currence of evil in them long before it could have 
been implanted by this existence, has forced acute 
observers to assume that the human spirit has made 
choice of evil in a pre-natal sphere similar to this. 
Every one who knows children rejects the Pelagian 
theory of their immaculate innocence. As soon as 
they have the power to do wrong, without any teach- 
ing the wrong is done as a natural proceeding. 

The germ of sin springs up from some old sowing. 
But the Augustinian doctrine is equally untrue to hu- 
man nature. The most incorrigible tendency to evil 
in an uninfluenced child cannot conceal the good 
within it, but merely indicates that former ill habits 
are working themselves out. Tiie depraved criminal 
at last sees his own folly when his course of sin is run, 
and becomes so weary of it that the next lease of life 



34 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

must be on a better plan. So evil is discovered to be 
good in the making, and vice is virtue in the strength- 
ening. 

Every person at some stage of growth awakens 
to the recognition of sin within him, and is certain 
that it is so radical as to reach back of all his present 
life, although it is surely foreign to his true nature. 
We all feel ourselves to have bounded into life like a 
stag carrying a panther which must be shaken off. 
Theology attempts to account for this by Adam's sin 
entailing a hereditary depravity. But our inmost 
consciousness agrees with the common sense of man- 
kind in holding us alone responsible for our tendency 
to wrong. Remorse seizes us for the inexplicable evil 
in us. The only solution is that of the parasite in the 
butterfly. The insect allowed the pest to enter when 
it was a worm. This blighted condition cannot be the 
original state of man. It must be the result of the 
human will resisting the divine, and choosing wrong 
in old existences beyond recollection. 

A masterly expression of this thought nourished the 
childhood of Christianity in the teaching of Origen, 1 
and flourished with wholesome influence until it was 
forcibly crushed out of popularity by the Council of 
Constantinople, to make room for the harsh dogmas 
which have since darkened the rationale of Christian- 
ity. It never was intelligently met and conquered, but 
was summarily ousted as incompatible with the weight 
of prejudice. The same treatment of it appears in 
Dr. Hodge's " Systematic Theology " (under the sec- 
tion on Preexistence). That it is in harmony with 
Scripture has been shown by Henry More, Soame Jen- 
yns, Chevalier Ramsay, and Professor Bowen, from 
1 See pages 233 et seq. 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 35 

whom quotations are given in chapter iv., and by other 
writers mentioned at the close of this book. Julius 
Miiller, 1 Lessing, 2 Edward Beecher, 3 Coleridge, and 
Kant 4 also sustain it from a religio-philosophical 
ground. It is the only rational explanation of the 
theological idea of sin. 

The same is true regarding the church's dogma of 
future punishments and rewards. A reasonable consid- 
eration fails to understand how the jump can be made 
from this condition of things to an eternity of either 
suffering or bliss — as ordinary theology demands. 
The Roman Catholics recognized this difficulty suffi- 
ciently to provide Purgatory, and in that tenet they 
meet the sense of humanity. Reincarnation simply 
says that there are many purgatories, and one is 
earth. The more rational Protestants get around the 
incongruity by permitting many grades of existence in 
heaven and hell, which approaches the same solution. 
Reincarnation says also, there are infinite degrees of 
heaven and hell, and many of them slope down through 
this life. It is inconceivable how earthly natures 
(and most of human souls are such) can find their pen- 
alties and their rewards elsewhere than on some kind of 
earth. The scheme of the universe presents every- 
where a simple and sublime habit of keeping affinities 
together, and it certainly seems as if the same economy 
could apply to souls as to atoms. This idea meets 
better than any other the principles that punishment 

1 See page 66. 2 See page 72. 8 See page 67. 

4 Kant's distinction between the Intelligible character and the 
Empirical or acquired character, which is a metaphysical form 
of the reincarnation view concerning the eternal Individuality 
and the temporal Personality, is shown by Professor Bowen on pp. 
102 et seq. 



36 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

for sin cannot continue longer than the sin continues, 
and that the everlasting mercy of the Supreme will pro- 
vide some final release for his erring children. 

6. Reincarnation explains many curious experiences. 
Most of us have known the touches of feeling and 
thought that seem to be reminders of forgotten things. 
Sometimes as dim dreams of old scenes, sometimes as 
vivid lightning flashes in the darkness recalling distant 
occurrences, sometimes with unutterable depth of mean- 
ing. It appears as if nature's opiate which ushered us 
here had been so diluted that it did not quite efface the 
old memories, and reason struggles to decipher the ves- 
tiges of a former state. Almost every one has felt the 
sense of great age. Thinking of some unwonted sub- 
ject often an impression seizes us that somewhere, long 
ago, we have had these reflections before. Learning 
a fact, meeting a face for the first time, we are puzzled 
with an obscure sense that it is familiar. Travel- 
ing newly in strange places we are sometimes haunted 
with a consciousness of having been there already. 
Music is specially apt to guide us into mystic depths, 
where we are startled with the flashing reminiscences 
of unspeakable verities which we have felt or seen 
ages since. Efforts of thought reveal the half-obliter- 
ated inscriptions on the tablets of memory, passing be- 
fore the vision in a weird procession. Every one has 
some such experiences. Most of them are blurred and 
obscure. But some are so remarkably distinct that 
those who undergo them are convinced that their sen- 
sations are actual recollections of events and places in 
former lives. It is even possible for certain persons 
to trace thus quite fully and clearly a part of their by- 
gone history prior to this life. 

Sir Walter Scott was so impressed by these expert 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 37 

ences that they led him to a belief in preexistence. 
In his diary was entered this circumstance, February 17, 
1828 : " I cannot, I am sure, tell if it is worth mark- 
ing down, that yesterday, at dinner time, I was 
strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of 
preexistence, viz. a confused idea that nothing that 
passed was said for the first time ; that the same topics 
had been discussed and the same persons had stated 
the same opinions on them. . . . The sensation was 
so strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the 
desert and a calenture on board ship. ... It was 
very distressing yesterday, and brought to my mind 
the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal world. 
There was a vile sense of unreality in all I said or 
did." * That this was not due to the strain upon his 
later years is evident from the fact that the same expe- 
rience is referred to in one of his earliest novels, where 
this " sentiment of preexistence " was first described. 
In " Guy Mannering," Henry Bertram says : " Why 
is it that some scenes awaken thoughts which belong, 
as it were, to dreams of early and shadowy recol- 
lections, such as old Brahmin moonshine would have 
ascribed to a state of previous existence. How often 
do we find ourselves in society which we have never 
before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious 
and ill-defined consciousness that neither the scene 
nor the speakers nor the subject are entirely new ; 
nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the con- 
versation which has not yet taken place." 

Bulwer Lytton describes it as " that strange kind of 

inner and spiritual memory which often recalls to us 

places and persons we have never seen before, and 

which Platonists would resolve to be the unquenched 

1 Lockhart's Life of Scott (first edition, vol. vii. p. 114). 



38 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

and struggling consciousness of a former life." Again, 
in " Godolphin" (chapter xv.), he writes : " How 
strange is it that at times a feeling comes over us as we 
gaze upon certain places, which associates the scene 
either with some dim remembered and dreamlike im- 
ages of the Past, or with a prophetic and fearful omen 
of the Future. . . . Every one has known a similar 
strange and indistinct feeling at certain times and 
places, and with a similar inability to trace the cause." 

Edgar A. Poe writes (in " Eureka ") : " We walk 
about, amid the destinies of our world existence, accom- 
panied by dim but ever present memories of a Destiny 
more vast — very distant in the bygone time and in- 
finitely awful. . . . We live out a youth peculiarly 
haunted by such dreams, yet never mistaking them 
for dreams. As memories we know them. During 
our youth the distinctness is too clear to deceive us 
even for a moment. But the doubt of manhood dis- 
pels these feelings as illusions." 

Explicit occurrences of this class are found in the 
narratives of Hawthorne, Willis, Coleridge, De 
Quincey, and many other writers. A striking instance 
appears in a little memoir of the late William Hone, the 
Parodist, upon whom the experience made such a pro- 
found effect that it roused him from thirty years of 
materialistic atheism to a conviction of the soul's inde- 
pendence of matter. Being called in business to a 
house in a part of London entirely new to him, he kept 
noticing that he had never been that way before. 
" I was shown," he says, " into a room to wait. On 
looking around, to my astonishment everything ap- 
peared perfectly familiar to me : I seemed to recognize 
every object. I said to myself, what is this ? I was 
never here before and yet 1 have seen all this, and if 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 39 

so, there is a very peculiar knot in the shutter." He 
opened the shutter, and there was the knot. 

The experience of many persons supports this truth. 
The sacred Hindu books contain many detailed his- 
tories of transmigration. Kapila is said to have writ- 
ten out the Vedas from his recollection of them in a 
former life. The Vishnu Purana furnishes some en- 
tertaining instances of memory retained through suc- 
cessive lives. Pythagoras is related to have remem- 
bered his former existences in the persons of a herald 
named ^Ethalides, Euphorbus the Trojan, Hermo- 
timus of Clazomenae, and others. It is stated that he 
pointed out in the temple of Juno, at Argos, the shield 
with which, as Euphorbus, he attacked Patroclus in 
the Trojan war. The life of Apollonius of Tyana 
gives some extraordinary examples of his recogni- 
tions of persons he had known in preceding lives. 
All these cases are considered fictions by most people, 
because they trespass the limits of historical accuracy. 
But there are many facts in our own time that point 
in the same direction. The Druses have no doubt 
that this life follows many others. A Druse boy ex- 
plained his terror at the discharge of a gun by saying, 
"I was born murdered ; " that is, the soul of a man 
who had been shot entered into his body. A scholarly 
friend of the writer is satisfied that he once lived 
among the mountains before his present life, for, 
though born in a flat country destitute of pines, his 
first young entrance to a wild pine-grown mountain dis- 
trict roused the deepest sense of familiarity and home- 
likeness. And his last life, he thinks, was as a woman, 
because of certain commanding feminine traits which 
continually assert themselves. And this in spite of 
an apparently strong masculine nature, which never 
excites a suspicion of effeminacy. 



40 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

Another friend of the writer says that his only 
child, a little girl now deceased, often referred to a 
younger sister of whom he knew nothing. When cor- 
rected with the assurance that she had no sister, she 
would reply, " Oh, yes, I have ! I have a little baby 
sister in heaven ! " The same gentleman tells this 
anecdote of a neighbor's family where the subject of 
reincarnation is never mentioned. A group of chil- 
dren was playing in the house at a counting game 
while their mother watched them. When they reached 
one hundred they started again at one and climbed 
up the numbers once more. The brightest boy com- 
mented on the proceeding : " We count ten, twenty, 
thirty, and so on to a hundred. Then we get through 
and begin all over. Mamma ! That 's the way people 
do. They go on and on till they come to the end, 
and then they begin over again. I hope 1 11 have you 
for a mamma again the next time I begin." Law- 
rence Oliphant gives in " Blackwood's Magazine " for 
January, 1881, a remarkable account of a child who 
remembered experiences of previous lives. 

A writer in " Notes and Queries," second series, 
vol. iv. p. 157, says, " A gentleman of high intellectual 
attainments, now deceased, once told me that he had 
dreamed of being in a strange city, so vividly that he 
remembered the streets, houses, and public buildings 
as distinctly as those of any place he ever visited. A 
few weeks afterward he was induced to visit a pano- 
rama in Leicester Square, when he was startled by 
seeing the city of which he had dreamed. The like- 
ness was perfect except that one additional church ap- 
peared in the picture. He was so struck by the cir- 
cumstance that he spoke to the exhibitor, assuming 
for his purpose the air of a traveler acquainted with . 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 41 

the place. He was informed that the additional 
church was a recent erection." It is difficult to ac- 
count for such a fact by the hypothesis of the double 
structure of the brain, or by clairvoyance. 

In Lord Lindsay's description of the valley of 
Kadisha ("Letters," p. 351, ed. 1847) he says : " We 
saw the river Kadisha descending* from Lebanon. The 
whole scene bore that strange and shadowy resem- 
blance to the wondrous landscape in 4 Kubla Khan ' 
that one so often feels in actual life, when the whole 
scene around you appears to be reacting after a long 
interval. Your friends seated in the same juxtaposi- 
tion, the subjects of conversation the same, and shift- 
ing with the same dreamlike ease, that you remember 
at some remote and indefinite period of preexistence ; 
you always know what will come next, and sit spell- 
bound, as it were, in a sort of calm expectancy." 

Dickens, in his "Pictures from Italy," mentions this 
instance, on his first sight of Ferrara : " In the fore- 
ground was a group of silent peasant girls, leaning 
over the parapet of the little bridge, looking now up 
at the sky, now down into the water ; in the dis- 
tance a deep dell ; the shadow of an approaching 
night on everything. If I had been murdered there 
in some former life I could not have seemed to re- 
member the place more thoroughly, or with more em- 
phatic chilling of the blood ; and the real remem- 
brance of it acquired in that minute is so strengthened 
by the imaginary recollection that I hardly think I 
could forget it." 

A passage in the story of "The Wool-gatherer" 
shows that James Hogg, the author, shared the same 
feeling and attributed it to an earlier life on earth. 
N. P. Willis wrote a story of himself as the reincar- 



42 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

nation of an Austrian artist, narrating how he discov- 
ered his previous personality, in "Dashes at Life," 
under the title " A Kevelation of a Previous Exist- 
ence." D. G. Eossetti does the same in his story 
" St. Agnes of Intercession." 

The well-known lecturer, Eugene Ashton, recently 
contributed to a Cincinnati paper these two anec- 
dotes : — 

" At a dinner party in New York, recently, a lady, 
who is one of New York's most gifted singers, said to 
one of the guests : ' In some reincarnation I hope to 
perfect my voice, which I feel is now only partially 
developed. So long as I do not attain the highest 
of which my soul is capable I shall be returned to the 
flesh to work out what nature intended me to do.' 
'But, madam, if you expect incarnations, have you 
any evidence of past ones ? ' ' Of that I cannot 
speak positively. I can recall dimly things which 
seem to have happened to me when I was in the flesh 
before. Often I go to places which are new to the 
present personality, but they are not new to my soul ; 
I am sure that I have been there before.' 

" A Southern literary woman, who now lives in Brook- 
lyn, speaking of her former incarnations, says : ' I 
am sure that I have lived in some past time ; for in- 
stance, when I was at Heidelberg, Germany, attending 
a convention of Mystics, in company with some friends 
I paid my first visit to the ruined Heidelberg Castle. 
As I approached it I was impressed with the existence 
of a peculiar room in an inaccessible portion of the 
building. A paper and pencil were provided me, and 
I drew a diagram of the room even to its peculiar 
floor. My diagram and description were perfect, 
when we afterwards visited the room. In some way 



4 >\ 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 48 

not yet clear to me I have been connected with that 
apartment. Still another impression came to me 
with regard to a book, which I was made to feel was 
in the old library of the Heidelberg University. I 
not only knew what the book was, but even felt that 
a certain name of an old German professor would be 
found written in it. Communicating this feeling to 
one of the Mystics at the convention, a search was 
made for the volume, but it was not found. Still the 
impression clung to me, and another effort was made 
to find the book ; this time we were rewarded for our 
pains. Sure enough, there on the margin of one of 
the leaves was the very name I had been given in 
such a strange manner. Other things at the same 
time went to convince me that I was in possession of 
the soul of a person who had known Heidelberg two 
or three centuries ago.' " 

The writer knows a gentleman who has repeatedly 
felt a vivid sense of some one striking his skull with 
an axe, although nothing in his own experience or in 
that of his family explains it. An extraordinary per- 
son to whom he had never hinted the matter once sur- 
prised him by saying that his previous life was closed 
by murder in that very way. Another acquaintance 
is sure that some time ago he was a Hindu, and recol- 
lects several remarkable incidents of that life. 

Objectors ascribe these enigmas to a jumble of as- 
sociations producing a blurred vision, — like the drunk- 
ard's experience of seeing double, a discordant remem- 
brance, snatches of forgotten dreams, — or to the 
double structure of the brain. In one of the lobes, 
they say, the thought flashes a moment in advance of 
the other, and the second half of the thinking machine 
regards the first impression as a memory of something 



44 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

long distant. 1 But this explanation is unsatisfactory, 
as it fails to account for the wonderful vividness of some 
of these impressions in well-balanced minds, or the 
long trains of thought which come independent of any 
companions, or the prophetic glimpses which anticipate 
actual occurrences. Far more credible is it that each 
soul is a palimpsest inscribed again and again with 
one story upon another, and whenever the all-wise Au- 
thor is ready to write a grander page on us He washes 
off the old ink and pens his latest word. But some of 
us can trace here and there letters of the former man- 
uscript not yet effaced. 

A contributor to the " Penn Monthly," of Septem- 
ber, 1875, refers to the hypothesis of double mental 
vision as supposed to account for most of these 
instances, and then concludes : " Such would be my 
inference as regards ordinary cases of this sort of rem- 
iniscence, especially when they are observed to ac- 
company any impaired health of the organs of mental 
action. But there are more extraordinary instances 
of this mental phenomenon, of which I can give no ex- 
planation. Three of these have fallen within my own 
range of observation. A friend's child of about four 
years old was observed by her older sister to be talk- 
ing to herself about matters of which she could not be 
supposed to know anything. 'Why, W ,' ex- 
claimed the older sister, 4 what do you know about 
that ? All that happened before you were born ! ' 

1 1 would have you know, L , that I grew old in 

heaven before I was born.' I do not quote this as if 

1 As a physiological explanation of these instances, Dr. Wigan 
published in 1844 a curious book entitled, " The Duality of the 
Mind " (London), which excited animated discussions and called 
forth a number of circumstances which the double structure of 
the brain could not explain. 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 45 

it explained what the child meant it to explain, but as 
a curious statement from the mouth of one too young 
to have ever heard of preexistence, or to have inferred 
it from any ambiguous mental experiences of her own. 
The second case is that of the presence of inexplicable 
reminiscences, or what seem such in dreams. As 
everybody knows, the stuff which dreams are ordinarily 
made of is the e very-day experience of life, which we 
cast into new and fantastic combinations, whose laws 
of arrangement and succession are still unknown to 
us. In the list of my acquaintances is a young mar- 
ried lady, a native of Philadelphia, who is repeatedly but 
not habitually carried back in her dreams to -English 
society of the eighteenth century, seemingly of the 
times of George II. , and to a social circle somewhat 
above that in which she now lives. Her acquaintance 
with literature is not such as to give her the least clue 
to the matter, and the details she furnishes are not 
such as would be gathered from books of any class. 
The dress, especially the lofty and elaborate head- 
dresses of the ladies, their slow and stately minuet 
dancing, the deference of the servants to their supe- 
riors, the details of the stiff, square brick houses, in 
one of which she was surprised to find a family 
chapel with mural paintings and a fine organ — all 
these she describes with the sort of detail possible to 
one who has actually seen them, and not in the fashion 
in which book-makers write about them. Yet another, 
a more wide-awake experience, is that of a friend, who 
remembers having died in youth and in India. He 
sees the bronzed attendants gathered about his cradle 
in their white dresses ; they are fanning him. And 
as they gaze he passes into unconsciousness. Much of 
his description concerned points of which he knew 



46 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

nothing from any other source, but all was true to 
the life, and enabled me to fix on India as the scene 
which he recalled." 

7. The strongest support of reincarnation is its happy 
solution of the problem of moral inequality and in- 
justice and evil which otherwise overwhelms us as we 
survey the world. The seeming chaos is marvelously 
set in order by the idea of soul-wandering. Many a 
sublime intellect has been so oppressed with the topsy- 
turviness of things here as to cry out, " There is no 
God. All is blind chance." An exclusive view of 
the miseries of mankind, the prosperity of wickedness, 
the struggles of the deserving, the oppression of the 
masses, or, on the other hand, the talents and suc- 
cesses and happiness of the fortunate few, compels one 
to call the world a sham without any moral law. But 
that consideration yields to a majestic satisfaction 
when one is assured that the present life is only one 
of a grand series in which every individual is gradu- 
ally going the round of infinite experience for a glori- 
ous outcome, — that the hedging ills of to-day are a 
consequence of what we did yesterday and a step 
toward the great things of to-morrow. Thus the 
tangled snarls of earthly phenomena are straightened 
out as a vast and beautiful scheme, and the total ex- 
perience of humanity forms a magnificent tapestry of 
perfect poetic justice. 

The crucial test of any hypothesis is whether it 
meets all the facts better than any other theory. No 
other view so admirably accounts for the diversity of 
conditions on earth, and refutes the charge of fa- 
voritism on the part of Providence. Hierocles said, 
and many a philosopher before and since has agreed 
with him, " Without the doctrine of metempsychosis 



EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 47 

it is not possible to justify the ways of God." Some 
of the theologians have found the idea of preexistence 
necessary to a reasonable explanation of the world, 
although it is considered foreign to the Bible. Over 
thirty years ago, Dr. Edward Beecher published 
" The Conflict of Ages," in which the main argument 
is this thought. He demonstrates that the facts of 
sin and depravity compel the acceptance of this doc- 
trine to exonerate God from the charge of malicious- 
ness. His book caused a lively controversy, and was 
soon followed by " The Concord of Ages," in which 
he answers the objections and strengthens his posi- 
tion. The same truth is taught by Dr. Julius Miiller, 
a German theologian of prodigious influence among 
the clergy. Another prominent leader of theological 
thought, Dr. Dorner, sustains it. 

We conclude, therefore, that reincarnation is ne- 
cessitated by immortality, that analogy teaches it, 
that science upholds it, that the nature of the soul 
needs it, that many strange sensations support it, 
and that it alone grandly solves the problem of life. 
The fullness of its meaning is majestic beyond ap- 
preciation, for it shows that every soul, from the 
lowest animal to the highest archangel, belongs to 
the infinite family of God and is eternal in its con- 
scious essence, perishing only in its temporary dis- 
guises ; that every act of every creature is followed 
by infallible reactions which constitute a perfect law 
of retribution ; and that these souls are intricately in- 
terlaced with mutual relationships. The bewildering 
maze thus becomes a divine harmony. No individual 
stands alone, but trails with him the unfinished se- 
quels of an ancestral career, and is so bound up with 
his race that each is responsible for all and all for 



48 EVIDENCES OF REINCARNATION. 

each. No one can be wholly saved until all are re- 
deemed. Every suffering we endure apparently for 
faults not our own assumes a holy light and a sublime 
dignity. This thought removes the littleness of petty 
selfish affairs and confirms in us the vastest hopes for 
mankind. 



III. 

OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 



Man has an Eternal Father who sent him to reside and gain ex- 
perience in the animal principles. — Paracelsus. 

God, who takes millions of years to form a soul that, shall under- 
stand Him, and he blessed ; who never needs to he and never is, in 
haste ; who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the 
return for seed he has sown upon the old fallows of eternity. — 

George Macdonald. 

It may be doubted whether the strangeness and improbability of 
this hypothesis (preexistence) among ourselves arises after all from 
grounds on which our philosophy has reason to congratulate itself. It 
may be questioned whether, if we examine ourselves candidly, we 
shall not discover that the feeling of extravagance with which it 
affects us has its secret source in materialistic or semi-materialistic 
prejudices. — Professor William Archer Butler's Lectures on 
Platonic Philosophy. 

Might not the human memory be compared to a field of sepulture, 
thickly stocked with the remains of many generations ? But of these 
thousands whose dust heaves the surface, a few only are saved from 
immediate oblivion, upon tablets and urns ; while the many are, at 
present, utterly lost to knowledge. Nevertheless each of the dead 
has left in that soul an imperishable germ ; and all, without distinc- 
tion, shall another day start up, and claim their dues. — Isaac 
Taylor. 

The absence of memory of any actions done in a previous state 
cauifot be a conclusive argument against our having lived through it. 
Forgetfulness of the past may be one of the conditions of an entrance 
upon a new stage of existence. The body which is the organ of 
sense-perception may be quite as much a hindrance as a help to re- 
membrance. In that case casual gleams of memory, giving us sud- 
den abrupt and momentary revelations of the past, are precisely the 
phenomena we would expect to meet with. If the soul has preexisted, 
what we would a priori anticipate are only some faint traces of re- 
collection surviving in the crypts of memory. — Professor Wil- 
liam Knight. 



III. 

OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 

There are four leading objections to the idea of re- 
births : — 

1. That we have no memory of past lives. 

2. That it is unjust for us to receive now the re- 
sults of forgotten deeds enacted long ago. 

3. That heredity confutes it. 

4. That it is an uncongenial doctrine. 

1. Why do we not remember something of our pre- 
vious lives, if we have really been through them ? 

The reason why there is no universal conviction 
from this ground seems to be that birth is so violent 
as to scatter all the details and leave only the net 
spiritual result. As Plotinus said, " Body is the true 
river of Lethe ; for souls plunged into it forget all." 
The real soul life is so distinct from the material 
plane that we have difficulty in retaining many expe- 
riences of this life. Who recalls all his childhood? 
And has any one a memory of that most wonderful 
epoch — infancy ? 

Nature sometimes shows us what may be the ini- 
tial condition of a man's next life in depriving him of 
his life's experience, and returning him to a second 
childhood, with only the character acquired during 



52 OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 

life for his inseparable fortune. The great and good 
prelate Frederick Christian von Oetingen of Wiirtem- 
berg (1702-1782) became in his old age a devout 
and innocent child, after a long life of usefulness. 
Gradually speech died away, until for three years he 
was dumb. Leaving his study, where he had written 
many edifying books, and his library, whose volumes 
were now sealed to him, he would go to the streets 
and join the children in their plays, and spend all his 
time sharing their delights. The profound scholar 
was stripped of his intellect and became a venerable 
boy, lovable and kind as in all his busy life. He had 
bathed in the river of Lethe before his time. Similar 
cases might be produced, where the spirits of strong 
men have been divested of a lifetime's memory in 
aged infancy, seeming to be a foretaste of the next 
existence. They show that the loss of a life's details 
does not appear strange to nature, and that the ne- 
penthic waters of Styx, which the ancients represented 
as imbibed by souls about to reenter earthly life to 
dispel recollection of former experiences, are not 
wholly fabulous. 

" Memory of the details of the past is absolutely 
impossible. The power of the conservative faculty 
though relatively great is extremely limited. We 
forget the larger portion of experience soon after we 
have passed through it, and we should be able to re- 
call the particulars of our past years, filling all the 
missing links of consciousness since w r e entered on the 
present life, before we were in a position to remem- 
ber our ante-natal experience. Birth must necessarily 
be preceded by crossing the river of oblivion, while 
the capacity for fresh acquisition survives, and the 



OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 53 

garnered wealth of old experience determines the 
amount and character of the new." 1 

But it has been shown that there are traces of 
former existences lingering in some memories. These 
and other exceptional departures from the general 
rule furnish substantial evidence that the obliteration 
of previous lives from our consciousness is only ap- 
parent. Sleep, somnambulism, trance, and similar 
conditions open up a world of super-sensuous reality 
to illustrate how erroneous are our common notions of 
memory. Experimental evidence demonstrates that 
we actually forget nothing, though for long lapses we 
are unable to recall what is stored away in the cham- 
bers of our soul ; and that the Orientals may be right 
in affirming that as a man's lives become purer he is 
able to look backward upon previous stages, and at 
last will view the long vista of the aeons by which he 
has ascended to God. Many cases reveal that the 
reach and clearness of memory are greatly increased 
during sleep and still more greatly during somnam- 
bulent trance ; so much so that the memory of some 
sleepings and of most trances is sufficiently distinct 
from the memory of the same individual in waking 
consciousness, to seem the faculty of a different 
person. And, while the memory of sensuous con- 
sciousness does not retain the facts of the trance 
condition, the memory of the trance state retains and 
includes all the facts of the sensuous consciousness 
— exemplifying the superior and unsuspected powers 
of our unconscious selves. Instances are frequent 
illustrating how the higher consciousness faithfully 
stores away experiences which are thought to be long 

1 Professor William Knight, in the Fortnightly Review, 1878. 
See p. 95. 



54 OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 

forgotten until some vivid touch brings them forth 
in accurate order. 1 The higher recollection and the 
lower sometimes conduct us through a double life. 
Dreams that vanish during the day are resumed at 
night in an unbroken course. There is an interest- 
ing class of cases on record in which the memory 
which links our successive dual states of consciousness 
into a united whole is so completely wanting that in 
observing only the difference between the two phases 
of the same person we describe it as " alternating con- 
sciousness." These go far toward an empirical proof 
that one individual can become two distinct persons 
in succession, making a practical demonstration of 
reincarnation. Baron Du Prel's " Philosophie der 
Mystik " cites a number of such authentic instances, 
of which the following is one, given by Dr. Mitchell 
in " Archiv fur thierischen Magnetismus," iv. 

1 Leibnitz first directed attention to these singular pheno- 
mena. Sir William Hamilton has collected a number of in- 
stances of such wonderful revival of memory. Carpenter's 
Mental Physiology, pp. 430 et seq., and Brodie's Psychological In- 
quiries, Second Series, p. 55, mention several cases. Coleridge 
cited from the German a remarkable illustration, and com- 
mented upon it in his Biographia Literaria, chapter vi. : — 

" This fact (and it would not be difficult to adduce several of 
the same kind) contributes to make it even probable that all 
thoughts are in themselves imperishable ; and that, if the in- 
telligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it 
would require only a different and apportioned organization, the 
body celestial instead of the body terrestrial, to bring before every 
human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence. 
And this — this, perchance, is the dread Book of Judgment, in 
whose mysterious hieroglyphics every idle word is recorded ! 
Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible 
that heaven and earth should pass away than that a single act, a 
single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain 
of causes to all whose links, conscious or unconscious, the free 
will, our only absolute Self, is co-extensive and co-present." 






OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 55 

M Miss R enjoyed naturally perfect health, and 

reached womanhood without any serious illness. She 
was talented, and gifted with a remarkably good 
memory, and learned with great ease. Without any 
previous warning she fell one day into a deep sleep 
which lasted many hours, and on awakening she had 
forgotten every bit of her former knowledge, and her 
memory had become a complete tabula rasa. She 
again learned to spell, read, write, and reckon, and 
made rapid progress. Some few months afterward 
she again fell into a similarly prolonged slumber, from 
which she awoke to her former consciousness, i. e., in 
the same state as before her first long sleep, but 
without the faintest recollection of the existence or 
events of the intervening period. This double ex- 
istence now continued, so that in a single subject 
there occurred a regular alternation of two perfectly 
distinct personalities, each being unconscious of the 
other, and possessing only the memories and knowledge 
acquired in previous corresponding states." 

More singular still are cases in which one individual 
becomes two interchanging persons, of whom one is 
wholly unconnected with the known history of that in- 
dividual, like that narrated in Mr. Stevenson's story 
of " The Adventures of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde," and 
Julian Hawthorne's story of " Archibald Malmaison." 
The newspapers recently published an account of a 
Boston clergyman, who strangely disappeared from 
his city, leaving no trace of his destination. Just be- 
fore going away he drew some money from the bank, 
and for weeks his family and friends heard nothing of 
him, though he had previously been most faithful. 
Soon after his departure a stranger turned up in a 
Pennsylvania town and bought out a certain store, 



56 OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 

which he conducted very industriously for some time. 
At length a delirious illness seized him. One day he 
awoke from it and asked his nurse, " Where am I ? " 

"You are in ," she said. "How did I get 

here? I belong in Boston." " You have lived here 

for three months and own Mr. 's store," replied 

his attendant. " You are mistaken, madam ; I am the 

Rev. , pastor of the church in Boston." 

Three months were an absolute blank. He had no 
memory of anything since drawing the money at his 
bank. Returning home, he there resumed the broken 
line of his ministerial life and continued in that char- 
acter without further interruption. 

Numerous similar cases are recorded in the annals 
of psychological medicine, and justify us in assuming, 
according to the law of correspondences, tha,t some 
such alternation of consciousness occurs after the 
great change known as death. The attempt to ex- 
plain them as mental aberrations is wholly unsuccess- 
ful. Reincarnation shows them to be exceptions prov- 
ing the rule — the recall of former activities supposed 
to be forgotten. In these examples of double identity 
the facts of each state disappear when the other set 
come forward and are resumed again in their turn. 
Where did they reside meanwhile ? They must have 
been preserved in a subtler organ than the brain, 
which is only the medium of translation from that un- 
conscious memory to the world of sense-perception. 
This must be in the super-sensuous part of the soul. 
This provides that, as a slow and painful training leads 
to unconscious habits of skill, so the experience of 
life is stored up in the higher memory, and becomes, 
when assimilated, the reflex acts of the following life, 
— those operations which we call instinctive and hered- 
itary. 



OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 57 

2. The question is raised, is it just that a man 
should suffer for what he is not conscious of having 
done? 

As just as that he should enjoy the results of what 
lie does not remember causing. It is said that justice 
requires that the offender be conscious of the fault 
for which he is punished. But the ideas of justice 
between man and man cannot be applied to the all- 
wise operations of the Infinite. In human attempts at 
justice that method is imperative because of our lia- 
bility to mistake. God's justice is vindicated by the 
undisturbed sway of the law of causation. If I suffer 
it must be for what / have done. The faith in Provi- 
dence demands this, and it is because of unbelief in 
reincarnation that the seeming negligence on the part 
of Providence has obliterated the idea of a Personal 
God from many minds. Nature is the arena of in- 
fallible cause and effect, and there is no such absurd- 
ity in the universe as an effect without a responsible 
cause. A man may suffer from a disease in ignorance 
of the conditions under which its germs were sown in 
his body, but the right sequence of cause and effect is 
not imperiled by his ignorance. To doubt that the 
experiences we now enjoy and endure properly belong 
to us by our own choice is to abandon the idea of 
God. How and why they have come is explained 
only by reincarnation. The universal Over-Soul 
makes no mistakes. By veiling our memories the 
Mother Heart of all, mercifully saves us the horror 
and burden of knowing all the myriad steps by which 
we have become what we are. We would be stag- 
gered by the sight of all our waywardness, and what 
we have done well is possessed more richly in the 
grand total than would be possible in the infinite de- 



58 OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 

tails. We are in the hands of a generous omniscient 
banker, who says : " I will save you all the trouble of 
the accounts. Whenever you are ready to start a new 
folio, I will strike the balance and turn over your net 
proceeds with all accrued interests. The itemized rec- 
ords of your deposits and spendings are beyond your 
calculation.' 9 

3. It may be claimed that the facts of heredity bear 
against reincarnation. As the physical, mental, and 
moral peculiarities of children come from the parents, 
how can it be possible that a man is what he makes 
himself — the offspring of his own previous lives? 

Science is certain of the tendency of every organism 
to transmit its own qualities to its descendants, and 
the intricate web of ancestral influences is assumed to 
account for all the aberrations of individual life. But 
the forces producing this result are beyond the ken of 
science. The mechanical theory of germ cells multi- 
plying their kind is inadequate : for the germs be- 
come more complex and energetic with growth, and ex- 
ceed the limitations of molecular physics. The facts 
of heredity demand the existence in nature of super- 
sensuous forces escaping our observation and cogniz- 
able only through their effects on the plane of sen- 
suous consciousness. These forces residing in the 
inaccessible regions of the soul mould all individual 
aptitudes and faculties and character. Reincarnation 
includes the facts of heredity, by showing that the 
tendency of every organism to reproduce its own like- 
ness groups together similar causes producing similar 
effects, in the same lines of physical relation. Instead 
of being content with the statement that heredity 
causes the resemblances of child to parent, reincarna- 
tion teaches that a similarity of ante-natal develop. 



OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 59 

rnent has brought about the similarity of embodied 
characteristics. The individual soul seeking another 
birth finds the path of least resistance in the channels 
best adapted to its qualities. The Ego selects its 
material body by a choice more wise than any volun- 
tary selection, by the inherent tendencies of its nature, 
in fitness for its need, not only in the particular phy- 
sique best suited for its purpose, but in the larger phys- 
ical casements of family and nationality. The rela- 
tion of child and parent is required by the similarity 
of organisms. This view accounts also for the dif- 
ferences invariably accompanying the resemblances. 
Identity of character is impossible, and the conditions 
which made it easy for an individual to be born in a 
certain family, because of the adaptation of circum- 
stances there to the expression of portions of his na- 
ture, would not prevent a strong contrast between him 
and his relatives in some respects. The facts observed 
in the life history of twins show that two individuals 
born under precisely identical conditions, and having 
exactly the same heredity, sometimes differ completely 
in physique, in intellect, and in character. The birth 
of geniuses in humble and commonplace circumstances 
furnishes abundant evidence that the individual soul 
outstrips all the trammels of physical birth ; and the 
unremarkable children of great parents exhibit the in- 
efficiency of merely hereditary influences. These con- 
spicuous violations of the laws of heredity confirm 
reincarnation. 

4. At the first impression the idea of re-births is 
unwelcome, because — 

a. It is interlaced with the theory of transmigration 
through animals ; 

b. It destroys the hope of recognizing friends in the 
coming existence ; 



60 OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 

c. It seems a cold, irreligious notion. 

a. As will be fully shown in chapter xii., the con- 
ceit of a transmigration of human souls through animal 
bodies, although it has been and is cherished by most 
of the believers in reincarnation, is only a gross meta- 
phor of the germinal truth, and never was received by 
the enlightened advocates of plural existences. 

b. The most thoughtful adherents of a future life 
agree that there must be there some subtler mode of 
recognition between friends than physical appearances, 
for these outer signs cannot endure in the world of 
spirit. The conviction that " whether there be prophe- 
cies they shall fail, whether there be tongues they shall 
cease, whether there be knowledge it shall vanish 
away," but " love never faileth," and only character 
shall remain as the means of identification, is precisely 
the view entertained by believers in reincarnation. 
The most intimate ties of this life cannot be explained 
otherwise than as renewals of old intimacies, drawn to- 
gether by the spiritual gravitation of love, and enjoy- 
ing often the sense of a previous similar experience. 
(A further reference to this point will be found later. 
See page 295.) 

c. The strongest religious natures have been nour- 
ished from time immemorial with the feeling that life 
is a pilgrimage through which we tread our darkened 
way back to God. The Scriptures are full of it, and 
the spiritual manhood of every age has found it a 
source of invigoration. From Abraham, who reckoned 
his lifetime as " the days of the years of his pilgrim- 
age," through all the phases of Christian thought to 
the mightiest book of modern Christendom, " The 
Pilgrim's Progress," this idea has been universally 
cherished. A typical expression of it may be seen in 



OBJECTIONS TO REINCARNATION. 61 

the mediaeval churchyard of St. Martin at Canterbury, 
upon a stone over the remains of Dean Alf ord bearing 
these words in Latin, which were inscribed by his own 
direction : " The inn of a traveler journeying to Jeru- 
salem." Now this pilgrimage philosophy is only a 
simpler phrasing of reincarnation. Our theory ex- 
tends the journey in just proportion to the supernal 
destination, providing many a station by the way, 
wherein abiding a few days we may more profitably 
traverse the upward road, gathering so much experi- 
ence that there will be no occasion to wander again. 
Instead of being a cold philosophic hypothesis, rein- 
carnation is a living unfold ment of that Christian 
germ, enlarged to a fullness commensurate with the 
needs of men and the character of God. It throbs 
with the warmth of deepest piety combined with no- 
blest intelligence, providing as no other supposition 
does, for the grandest development of mankind. 



IV. 

WESTERN PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 



I think I must once have been masculine, because my love is all 
for girls. — Louisa M. Alcott. 

The greatest guilt of man is that he was born. — Calderon. 

I seem often clearly to remember in my soul a presentiment which I 
have not seen with my present, but with some other eye. — J. E. Von 
Schubert. 

I produced the golden key of preexistence only at a dead lift, when v 
no other method could satisfy me touching the ways of God, that by 
this hypothesis I might keep my heart from sinking. — Henry More. 

The essences of our souls can never cease to be because they never 
began to be, and nothing can live eternally but that which hath lived 
from eternity. The essences of our souls were a breath in God before 
they became living souls ; they lived in God before they lived in the 
created souls, and therefore the soul is a partaker of the eternity of 
God. — William Law. 

If there be no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that 
period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are 
no grounds for supposing that we shall continue to exist after our ex- 
istence has apparently ceased. — Shelley. 

The ancient doctrine of transmigration seems the most rational and 
most consistent with God's wisdom and goodness; as by it all the un- 
equal dispensations of things so necessary in one life may be set right 
in another, and all creatures serve the highest and lowest, the most 
eligible and most burdensome offices of life by an equitable rotation ; 
by which means their rewards and punishments may not only be pro- 
portioned to their behavior, but also carr;f on the business of the uni- 
verse, and thus at the same time answer the purposes both of justice 
and utility. — Soame Jenyns. 



IV. 

WESTERN PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

There is a larger endorsement of reincarnation 
among western thinkers than the world knows. In 
many of them it springs up spontaneously, while oth- 
ers embrace it as a luminous ray from the East which 
is confirmed by all the candid tests of philosophy. 
When Christianity first swept over Europe the inner 
thought of its leaders was deeply tinctured with this 
truth. The Church tried ineffectually to eradicate it, 
and in various sects it kept sprouting forth beyond the 
time of Erigena and Bonaventura, its mediaeval advo- 
cates. Every great intuitional soul, as Paracelsus, 
Boehme, and Swedenborg, has adhered to it. The Ital- 
ian luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella, em- 
braced it. The best of German philosophy is enriched 
by it. In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel, Leibnitz, 
Herder, and Fichte the younger, it is earnestly advo- 
cated. The anthropological systems of Kant and 
Schelling furnish points of contact with it. The 
younger Helmont, in " De Eevolutione Animarum," ad- 
duces in two hundred problems all the arguments which 
may be urged in favor of the return of souls into 
human bodies, according to Jewish ideas. Of English 
thinkers the Cambridge Platonists defended it with 
much learning and acuteness, most conspicuously Henry 
More ; and in Cud worth and Hume it ranks as the 



66 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

most rational theory of immortality. Glanvil's " Lux 
Orientalis" devotes a curious treatise to it. It capti- 
vated the minds of Fourier and Leroux. Andre Pez- 
zani's book on " The Plurality of the Soul's Lives " 
works out the system on the Eoman Catholic idea of 
expiation. Modern astronomy has furnished material 
for the elaborate speculations of a reincarnation ex- 
tending through many worlds, as published in Fonte- 
nelle's volume " The Plurality of Worlds," Huygens's 
" Cosmotheoros," Brewster's "More Worlds than One ; 
the Philosopher's Faith and the Christian's Hope," 
Jean Raynaud's " Earth and Heaven," Flammarion's 
" Stories of Infinity " and " The Plurality of Inhabited 
Worlds," and Figuier's " The To-morrow of Death." 
With various degrees of fancy and probability these 
writers trace the soul's progress among the heavenly 
bodies. The astronomer Bode wrote that we start 
from the coldest planet of our solar system and ad- 
vance from planet to planet, nearer the sun, where the 
most perfect beings, he thinks, will live. Emmanuel 
Kant, in his " General History of Nature," says that 
souls start imperfect from the sun, and travel by planet 
stages, farther and farther away to a paradise in the 
coldest and remotest star of our system. Between 
these opposites many savants have formulated other 
theories. In theology reincarnation has retained a 
firm influence from the days of Origen and Porphyry, 
through the scholastics, to the present day. In Soame 
Jenyns's works, which long thrived as the best published 
argument for Christianity, it is noticeable. Chevalier 
Ramsay and William Law have also written in its de- 
fense. Julius Miiller warmly upholds it in his pro- 
found work on " The Christian Doctrine of Sin," as 
well as Dr. Dorner. Another^means of its dissemina- 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 67 

tion through a good portion of the ministry is Dr. Ed- 
ward Beecher's espousal of it, in the form of preexist- 
enee, in " The Conflict of Ages " and " The Concord of 
Ages." English and Irish bishops 1 have not hesitated 
to promulgate it. Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips 
Brooks have dared to preach it. James Freeman 
Clarke speaks strongly in its favor. Professor William 
Knight, the Scotch metaphysician of St. Andrews, and 
Professor Francis Bowen of Harvard University, clearly 
show the logical probabilities in which reincarnation 
compares favorably with any other philosophy. 2 

The following extracts from the most interesting of 
these and other Western authors who refer to the mat- 
ter may represent the unsuspected prevalence of this 
thought in our own midst. 

1. Schopenhauer's powerful philosophy includes re- 
incarnation as one of its main principles, as these ex- 
tracts show, from his chapter on "Death" in "The 
World as Will and Idea " : — 3 

" What sleep is for the individual, death is for the 
will [character] . It would not endure to continue the 
same actions and sufferings throughout an eternity, 
without true gain, if memory and individuality re- 
mained to it. It flings them off, and this is lethe ; 
and through this sleep of death it reappears refreshed 
and fitted out with another intellect, as a new being — 
4 a new day tempts to new shores.' " 

* A noble passage from one of the greatest of these may be 
found in Scott's Christian Life, chapter iii. section i. See also 
Dr. Henry More's Immortality of the Soul, Book II. chapter 
xvi., and Sir Kenelm Digby's remarks on Sir Thomas Browne's 
Religio Medici. 

2 A full list of the principal western writers on this subject is 
given in the Appendix. 

8 Haldane and Kemp's Translation, vol. iii. pp. 299-306. 



68 PROSE Y/RITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

" These constant new births, then, constitute the 
succession of the life-dreams of a will which in itself 
is indestructible, until, instructed and improved by so 
much and such various successive knowledge in a con- 
stantly new form, it abolishes or abrogates itself " — 
[becomes in jDerfect harmony with the Infinite]. 

" It must not be neglected that even empirical 
grounds support a palingenesis of this kind. As a 
matter of fact, there does exist a connection between 
the birth of the newly appearing beings and the death 
of those that are worn out. It shows itself in the 
great fruitfulness of the human race which appears as 
a consequence of devastating diseases. When in the 
fourteenth century the Black Death had for the most 
part depopulated the old world, a quite abnormal fruit- 
fulness appeared among the human race, and twin- 
births were very frequent. The circumstance was 
also remarkable that none of the children born at this 
time obtained their full number of teeth ; thus nature, 
exerting itself to the utmost, was niggardly in details. 
This is related by F. Schnurrer, ' Chronik der Seu- 
chen,' 1825. Casper also, L Ueber die Wahrschein- 
liche Lebensdauer des Menschen,' 1835, confirms the 
principle that the number of births in a given popula- 
tion has the most decided influence upon the length of 
life and mortality in it, as this always keeps pace with 
the mortality : so that always and everywhere the 
deaths and the births increase and decrease in like pro- 
portion ; which he places beyond doubt by an accumu- 
lation of evidence collected from many lands and their 
various provinces. And yet it is impossible that there 
can be a, physical causal connection between my early 
death and the fruitfulness of a marriage with which I 
have nothing to do, or conversely. Thus here the 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 69 

metaphysical appears undeniable and in a stupendous 
manner as the immediate ground of explanation of the 
physical. Every new-born being comes fresh and 
blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free 
gift : but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. 
Its fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death 
of a worn-out existence which has perished, but which 
contained the indestructible seed out of which the new 
existence has arisen : they are one being. To show 
the bridge between the two would certainly be the so- 
lution of a great riddle. 

" The great truth which is expressed here has never 
been entirely unacknowledged, although it could not 
be reduced to the exact and correct meaning, which is 
only possible through the doctrine of the primary and 
metaphysical nature of the will, and the secondary, 
merely organic nature of the intellect. We find the 
doctrine of metempsychosis, springing from the earliest 
and noblest ages of the human race, always spread 
abroad in the earth as the belief of the great majority 
of mankind ; nay, really as the teaching^of all religions, 
with the exception of that of the Jews and the two 
which have proceeded from it : in the most subtle form 
however, and coming nearest to the truth in Bud- 
dhism. Accordingly, while Christians console them- 
selves with the thought of meeting again in another 
world, in which one regains one's complete personality 
and knows one's self at once, in those other religions the 
meeting again is going on now, only incognito. In 
the succession of births, and by virtue of metempsy- 
chosis or palingenesis, the persons who now stand in 
close connection or contact with us will also be born 
again with us at the next birth, and will have the same 
or analogous relations and sentiments towards us as 



70 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

now, whether these are of a friendly or a hostile de- 
scription. Recognition is certainly here limited to an 
obscure intimation, — a reminiscence, which cannot be 
brought to distinct consciousness, and refers to an in- 
finitely distant time ; with the exception, however, of 
Buddha himself, who has the prerogative of distinctly 
knowing his own earlier births and those of others, — 
as this is described in the ' J&taka.' But in fact, if at 
a favorable moment one contemplates, in a purely ob- 
jective manner, the action of men in reality, the intui- 
tive conviction is forced upon one that it not only is 
and remains constantly the same, according to the 
[Platonic] Idea, but also that the present generation, 
in its true inner nature, is precisely and substantially 
identical with every generation that has been before 
it. The question simply is, in what this true being 
consists. The answer which my doctrine gives to this 
question is well known. The intuitive conviction re- 
ferred to may be conceived as arising from the fact 
that the multiplying-glasses, time and space, lose for a 
moment their effect. With reference to the univer- 
sality of the belief in metempsychosis, Obry says 
rightly in his excellent book ' Du Nirvana Indien,' p. 
13, ' Cette vielle croyance a fait le tour du monde, et 
tellement repandue dans la haute antiquity qu'un 
docte Anglican Favait jugee sans pere, sans mere, et 
sans gen^alogie.' Taught already in the ' Vedas * as 
in all the sacred books of India, metempsychosis is 
well known to be the kernel of Brahmanism and Bud- 
dhism. It accordingly prevails at the present day in 
the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, thus among more 
than half the whole human race, as the firmest convic- 
tion, and with an incredibly strong practical influence. 
It was also the belief of the Egyptians, from whom it 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 71 

was received with enthusiasm by Orpheus, Pythagoras, 
and Plato. The Pythagoreans, however, specially re- 
tained it. That it was also taught in the mysteries of 
the Greeks undeniably follows from the ninth book of 
Plato's Laws. The 'Eclda' also, especially in the 
'Voluspa,' teaches metempsychosis. Not less was it 
the foundation of the religion of the Druids. Even a 
Mohammedan sect in Hindustan, the Bohrahs, of 
which Colebrooke gives a full account in the ' Asiatic 
Kesearches,' believes in metempsychosis, and accord- 
ingly refrains from all animal food. Also among 
American Indians and negro tribes, nay, even among 
the natives of Australia, traces of this belief are found. 
. . . According to all this the belief in metempsy- 
chosis presents itself as the natural conviction of man 
whenever he reflects at all in an unprejudiced manner. 
It would really seem to be that which Kant falsely 
asserts of his three pretended ideas of the reason, a 
philosopheme natural to human reason, which proceeds 
from its forms ; and when it is not found it must 
have been displaced by positive religious doctrines com- 
ing from a different source. I have also remarked that 
it is at once obvious to every one who hears of it for 
the first time. Let any one only observe how earnestly 
Lessing defends it in the last seven paragraphs of his 
'Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts.' 1 Lichtenberg 
also says in his * Selbstcharacteristik ' : c I cannot get 
rid of the thought that I died before I was born.' 
Even the excessively empirical Hume says in his skep- 
tical essay on immortality, ' The metempsychosis is 
therefore the only system of this kind that philos- 
ophy can hearken to.' What resists this belief is 
Judaism, together with the two religions which have 
1 Translated in section 2 of this chapter. 



72 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

sprung from it, because they teach the creation of 
man out of nothing, and they have the hard task of 
linking on to this belief an endless existence a parte 
post. They certainly have succeeded, with fire and 
sword, in driving out of Europe and part of Asia that 
consoling primitive belief of mankind ; it is still doubt- 
ful for how long. Yet how difficult this was is shown 
by the oldest church histories. Most of the heretics 
were attached to this belief ; for example, Simonists, 
Basilidians, Valentinians, Marcionists, Gnostics, and 
Manicheans. The Jews themselves have in part fallen 
into it, as Tertullian and Justinus inform us. In the 
Talmud it is related that AbeFs soul passed into the 
body of Seth, and then into that of Moses. Even the 
passage of the Bible, Matt, xvi, 13-15, only obtains a 
rational meaning if we understand it as spoken under 
the assumption of the dogma of metempsychosis. . . . 
In Christianity, however, the doctrine of original sin, 
i. e., the doctrine of punishment for the sins of an- 
other individual, has taken the place of the transmi- 
gration of souls, and the expiation in this way of all 
the sins committed in an earlier life. Both identify 
the existing man with one who has existed before : the 
transmigration of souls does so directly, original sin 
indirectly." 

2. In the remarkable little treatise on " The Divine 
Education of the Human Eace," by Lessing, the Ger- 
man philosopher, a book so sublimely simple in its 
profound insight that it has had enormous influence 
and was translated into English as a labor of love by 
the Eev. Frederick W. Robertson, the author outlines 
the gradual instruction of mankind and shows how the 
enlightenment is still progressing through many im- 
portant lessons. His thought mounts to a climax in 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 73 

suggesting the stupendous programme by which God 
is developing the individual just as he has been edu- 
cating the race : — 

" The very same way by which the race reaches its 
perfection must every individual man-— one sooner, 
another later — have traveled over. Have traveled 
over in one and the same life ? Can he have been in 
one and the selfsame life a sensual Jew and a spirit- 
ual Christian ? Can he in the selfsame life have over- 
taken both ? 

" Surely not that : but why should not every indi- 
vidual man have existed more than once upon this 
world ? 

u Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it 
is the oldest ? Because the human understanding, be- 
fore the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and 
debilitated it, lighted upon it at once ? 

" Why may not even I have already performed 
those steps of my perfecting which bring to men only 
temporal punishments and rewards ? And once more, 
why not another time all those steps to perform which, 
the views of eternal rewards so powerfully assist us ? 

" Why should I not come back as often as I am ca- 
pable of acquiring fresh knowledge, fresh expertness ? 
Do I bring away so much from once that there is noth- 
ing to repay the trouble of coming back ? 

" Is this a reason against it ? Or, because I forget 
that I have been here already ? Happy is it for me 
that I do forget. The recollection of my former con- 
dition would permit me to make only a bad use of the 
present. And that which even I must forget now, is 
that necessarily forgotten forever ? 

" Or is it a reason against the hypothesis that so 
much time would have been lost to me ? Lost ? And 



74 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

how much then should I miss ? Is not a whole eter- 
nity mine ? ■' 

3. " The Destiny of Man," by J. G. Fichte, whose 
great thoughts still heave the heart of Germany and 
grandly mould the world, contains these paragraphs : 

"These two systems, the purely spiritual and the 
sensuous, — which last may consist of an immeasur- 
able series of particular lives, — exist in me from the 
moment when my active reason is developed, and 
pursue their parallel course. The former alone gives 
to the latter meaning and purpose and value. I am 
immortal, imperishable, eternal, so soon as I form the 
resolution to obey the law of reason. After an exist- 
ence of myriad lives the super-sensuous world can- 
not be more present than at this moment. Other con- 
ditions of my sensuous existence are to come, but 
these are no more the true life than the present con- 
dition is. 

" Man is not a product of the world of sense ; and 
the end of his existence can never be attained in that 
world. His destination lies beyond time and space 
and all that pertains to sense. 

"Mine eye discerns this eternal life and motion in 
all the veins of sensible and spiritual nature, through 
what seems to others a dead mass. And it sees this 
life forever ascend and grow and transfigure itself into 
a more spiritual expression of its own nature. The 
sun rises and sets, the stars vanish and return again, 
and all the spheres hold their cycle dance. But they 
never return precisely such as they disappeared ; and 
in the shining fountains of life there is also life and 
progress. 

" All death in nature is birth ; and precisely in 
dying, the sublimation of life appears most conspicu : 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 75 

ous. There is no death-bringing principle in nature, 
for nature is only life, throughout. Not death kills, 
but the more living life, which is hidden behind the 
old, begins and unfolds itself. Death and birth are 
only the struggles of life with itself to manifest itself 
in ever more transfigured form, more like itself. 

" Even because Nature puts me to death she must 
quicken me anew. It can only be my higher life, un- 
folding itself in her, before which my present life dis- 
appears; and that which mortals call death is the 
visible appearing of another vivification." 

4. Among the wealth of German geniuses, there is 
none more lofty and broad than Herder, whom Jean 
Paul admiringly pronounced, " a Poem made by some 
purest Deity, — combining the boldest freedom of 
philosophy concerning nature and God with a most 
pious faith." One of the most suggestive of this 
master's works is a series of " Dialogues on Metemp- 
sychosis," in which two friends discuss the theme to- 
gether. As the outcome of their colloquy is a stanch 
vindication of that hypothesis, it is not unfair to 
group together a few of the paragraphs on one side of 
the conversation : — 

" Do you not know great and rare men who cannot 
have become what they are at once, in a single hu- 
man existence? who must have often existed before 
in order to have attained that purity of feeling, that 
instinctive impulse for all that is true, beautiful, and 
good, in short, that elevation and natural supremacy 
over all around them ? 

" Do not these great characters appear, for the most 
part, all at once? Like a cloud of celestial spirits, 
descended from on high ; like men risen from the dead 
born again, who brought back the old time ? 



76 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

" Have you never had remembrances of a former 
state, which you could find no place for in this life? 
In that beautiful period when the soul is yet a half- 
closed bud, have you not seen persons, been in places, 
of which you were ready to swear that you had seen 
those persons, or had been in those places before? 
And yet it could not have been in this life ? The 
most blessed moments, the grandest thoughts, are 
from that source. In our more ordinary seasons, we 
look back with astonishment on ourselves, we do not 
comprehend ourselves. And such are we; we who, 
from a hundred causes, have sunk so deep and are 
so wedded to matter, that but few reminiscences of so 
pure a character remain to us. The nobler class of 
men who, separated from wine and meat, lived in per- 
fect simplicity according to the order of nature, carried 
it further, no doubt, than others, as we learn from the 
example of Pythagoras, of Iarchas, of Apollonius, and 
others, who remembered distinctly what and how 
many times they had been in the world before. If we 
are blind, or can see but two steps beyond our 
noses, ought we therefore to deny that others may see 
a hundred or a thousand degrees farther, even to the 
bottom of time, into the deep, cool well of the fore- 
world, and there discern everything plain and bright 
and clear?" 

To this last strain the listener responds : "I will 
freely confess to you that those sweet dreams of mem- 
ory are known to me also, among the experiences of 
my childhood and youth. I have been in places and 
circumstances of which I could have sworn that I had 
been in them before. I have seen persons with whom 
I seemed to have lived before ; with whom I was, as it 
were, on the footing of an old acquaintance." He 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 77 

then attempts to explain them as returned dreams, 
which his interlocutor answers with more wonderful 
impressions necessarily requiring a former life. 

" Have you never observed that children will some- 
times, on a sudden, give utterance to ideas which 
make us wonder how they got possession of them ; 
which presuppose a long series of other ideas and se- 
cret self-communings ; which break forth like a full 
stream out of the earth, an infallible sign that the 
stream was not produced in a moment from a few 
raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed be- 
neath the ground, and, it may be, had broken through 
many a rock, and contracted many defilements ? 

"You know the law of economy which rules 
throughout nature. Is it not probable that the Deity 
is guided by it in the propagation and progress of hu- 
man souls ? He who has not become ripe in one form 
of humanity is put into the experience again, and, 
some time or other, must be perfected. 

" I am not ashamed of my half-brothers the brutes ; 
on the contrary, as far as they are concerned, I am a 
great advocate of metempsychosis. I believe, for a 
certainty, that they will ascend to a higher grade of 
being, and am unable to understand how any one can 
object to this hypothesis, which seems to have the anal- 
ogy of the whole creation in its favor. 

" All the life of nature, all the tribes and species of 
animated creation, — what are they but sparks of the 
Godhead, a harvest of incarnate stars, among which 
the two human sexes stand forth like sun and moon ? 
We overshine, we dim the other figures, but, doubt- 
less, we lead them onward in a chorus invisible to our- 
selves. Oh, that an eye were given us to trace the 
shining course of this divine spark ; to see how life 



78 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

flows to life, and ever refining, impelled through all 
the veins of creation, wells up into a purer, higher life. 

" And yet Pythagoras, too, spoke of a Tartarus and 
an Elysium. When you stand before the statue of 
a high-hearted Apollo, do you not feel what you lack 
of being that form ? Can you ever attain to it here 
below, though you should return ten times ? And yet 
that was only the idea of an artist — a dream which 
our narrow breast also inclosed. Has the almighty 
Father no nobler forms for us than those in which 
our heart now heaves and groans ? The soul lies cap- 
tive in its dungeon, bound as with a sevenfold chain, 
and only through a strong grating, and only through a 
pair of light and air-holes, can it breathe and see, and 
always it sees the world on one side only, while there 
are a million other sides before us and in us, had we 
but more and other senses, and could we but exchange 
this narrow hut of our body for a freer prospect. 
That restless discontent shall some time finally release 
us from our repeated sojourns on earth, through 
which the Father is training us for a complete divorce 
from sense-life. When even at the sweetest fountains 
of friendship and love, we so often pine, thirsty and 
sick, seeking union and finding it not, what noble 
soul does not lift itself up and despise tabernacles and 
wanderings in the circle of earthly deserts. 

" Purification of the heart, the ennobling of the 
soul, with all its propensities and cravings, this, it 
seems to me, is the true palingenesis of this life, after 
which, I doubt not, a happy, more exalted, but yet un- 
known metempsychosis awaits us." 

5. Dr. Henry More, the learned and lovable Plato- 
nist of the seventeenth century, wrote a charming trea- 
tise on the "Immortality of the Soul," in which 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 79 

(chapter xii.) lie argues for preexistence as fol- 
lows : — 

" If it be good for tlie souls of men to be at all, 
the sooner they are, the better. But we are most cer- 
tain that the wisdom and goodness of God will do 
that which is the best ; and therefore if they can en- 
joy themselves before they come to these terrestrial 
bodies, they must be before they come into these 
bodies. For nothing hinders but that they may live 
before they come into the body, as well as they may 
after going out of it. Wherefore the preexistence of 
souls is a necessary result of the wisdom and good- 
ness of God. 

" Again, the face of Providence in the work seems 
very much to suit with this opinion, there being not 
any so natural and easy account to be given of those 
things that seem the most harsh in the affairs of men, 
as from this hypothesis : that these souls did once 
subsist in some other state ; where, in several man- 
ners and degrees, they forfeited the favor of their 
Creator, and so, according to that just Nemesis that 
He has interwoven in the constitution of the universe 
and of their own natures, they undergo several calam- 
ities and asperities of fortune and sad drudgeries of 
fate, as a punishment inflicted, or a disease contracted 
from the several obliquities of their apostasy. Which 
key is not only able to unlock that recondite mystery 
of some particular men's almost fatal averseness from 
all religion and virtue, their stupidity and dullness 
and even invincible slowness to these things from 
their very childhood, and their incorrigible propension 
to all manner of vice ; but also of that squalid forlorn- 
ness and brutish barbarity that whole nations for many 
ages have lain under, and many do still lie under at 



80 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

this very day : which sad scene of things must needs 
exceedingly cloud and obscure the ways of Divine 
Providence, and make them utterly unintelligible ; 
unless some light be let in from the present hypoth- 
esis. 

" And as this hypothesis is rational in itself, so has 
it also gained the suffrage of all philosophers of all 
ages, of any note, that have held the soul of man in- 
corporeal and immortal. I shall add, for the better 
countenance of the business, some few instances herein, 
as a pledge of the truth of my general conclusion. 
Let us cast our eye, therefore, into what corner of 
the world we will, that has been famous for wisdom 
and literature, and the wisest of those nations you 
shall find the asserters of this opinion. 

" In Egypt, that ancient nurse of all hidden sciences, 
that this opinion was in vogue amongst the wisest 
men there, the fragments of Trismegist do sufficiently 
witness: of which opinion, not only the Gymnoso- 
phists, and other wise men of Egypt, were, but also 
the Brachmans of India, and the Magi of Babylon 
and Persia. To these you may add the abstruse phi- 
losophy of the Jews, which they call their Cabbala, 
of which the soul's preexistence makes a considerable 
part, as all the learned of the Jews do confess. 

" And if I should particularize in persons of this 
opinion, truly they are such of so great fame for 
depth of understanding, and abstrusest science, that 
their testimony alone might seem sufficient to bear 
down any ordinary modest man into an assent to their 
doctrine. And, in the first place, if we believe the 
Cabbala of the Jews, we must assign it to Moses, the 
greatest philosopher certainly that ever was in the 
world ; to whom you may add Zoroaster, Pythagoras, 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 81 

Epicharmus, Cebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, 
Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, 
Boethius, Pfellus, and several others, which it would 
be too long to recite. And if it were fit to add 
fathers to philosophers, we might enter into the same 
list Synesius and Origen ; the latter of whom Avas 
surely the greatest light and bulwark that ancient 
Christianity had. But I have not yet ended my cata- 
logue ; that admirable physician Johannes Fernelius 
is also of this persuasion, and is not to be so himself 
only, but discovers those two grand-masters of medi- 
cine, Hippocrates and Galen, to be so, too. Cardan, 
also, that famous philosopher of his age, expressly 
concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct be- 
ing from the soul of the world, and that it does pre- 
exist before it comes into the body ; and lastly, Pom- 
ponatius, no friend to the soul's immortality, yet can- 
not but confess that the safest way to hold it is also 
therewith to acknowledge her preexistence. 

" And we shall evince that Aristotle, that has the 
luck to be believed more than most authors, was of the 
same opinion, in his treatise c De Anima,' where he 
says, ' for every art must use its proper instruments, 
and every soul its body.' He speaks something more 
plainly in his ; De Generatione Animae.' ' There are 
generated,' saith he, ' in the earth, and in the moisture 
thereof, plants and living creatures, and in the whole 
universe an animal heat ; insomuch that in a manner 
all places are full of souls.' We will add a third 
place still more clear, out of the same treatise, where 
he starts that very question of the preexistency of 
souls, of the sensitive and rational especially, and he 
concludes thus : ' It remains that the rational or intel- 
lectual soul only enters from without, as being only of 



82 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 



a nature purely divine ; with whose actions the actions 
of this gross body have no communication.' Concern- 
ing which point he concludes like an orthodox scholar 
of his excellent master Plato ; to whose footsteps the 
closer he keeps, the less he ever wanders from the 
truth. For in this very place he does plainly profess 
what many would not have him so apertly guilty of, 
that the soul of man is immortal, and can perform her 
proper functions without the help of this terrestrial 
body." 

6. Sir Thomas Browne explains and defends his 
own heresies, by suggesting the added heresy of re- 
incarnation : — 

" For, indeed, heresies perish not with their au- 
thors : but like the river Arethusa, though they lose 
their currents in one place, they rise up again in an- 
other. One general council is not able to extirpate 
one single heresy : it may be canceled for the present : 
but revolution of time and the like aspects from 
heaven will restore it, when it will flourish till it be 
condemned again. For, as though there were a me- 
tempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed into an- 
other, opinions do find, after certain revolutions, men 
and minds like those that first begat them. To see 
ourselves again, we need not look for Plato's year ; 
every man is not only himself : there have been many 
Diogeneses, and as many Timons, though but few of 
that name; men are lived over again; the world is 
now as it was in ages past ; there was none then, but 
there hath been some one since, that parallels him, 
and is, as it were, his revived self." 1 

7. One of the rare volumes of the early eighteentn 

1 Religio Medici, section vi. Professor Francis Bowen in- 
clines to this same view. See page 108 et seq. 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 83 

century is Chevalier Ramsay's remarkable work en- 
titled " The Philosophical Principles of Natural and 
Revealed Religion," in which he elaborates the idea 
that " the sacred mysteries of our holy faith are not 
new fictions unheard of by the philosophers of all 
nations," but that " on the contrary Christianity is as 
old as the creation." In this "History of the human 
mind in all ages, nations, and religions, concerning the 
most divine truths," he shows that reincarnation is 
the common possession of Christianity and of all the 
other great systems of sacred thought : — 

" The holy oracles always represent Paradise as our 
native country, and our present life as an exile. How 
can we be said to have been banished from a place in 
which we never were ? This argument alone would 
suffice to convince us of preexistence, if the prejudice 
of infancy inspired by the schoolmen had not accus- 
tomed us to look upon these expressions as metaphori- 
cal, and to believe, contrary to Scripture and to rea- 
son, that we were exiled from a happy state, only for 
the fault of our first parents. Atrocious maxim that 
sullies all the conduct of Providence, and that shocks 
the understandings of the most intelligent children of 
all nations. The answers ordinarily made to them 
throw into their tender minds the seeds of a lasting in- 
credulity. 

" In Scripture, the wise man says, speaking of the 
eternal Logos, and his preexistent humanity: 'The 
Lord possessed me from the beginning of his ways, 
before his works of old ; I was set up from everlast- 
ing, from the beginning or ever the earth was ! ' All 
<feis can be said only of the eternal Logos. But what 
follows may be applied to the preexistent humanity of 
the Messiah : 6 When he prepared the heavens I was 



84 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

there, when he encircled the force of the deep, when 
he established the clouds above, when he appointed 
the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, as 
one brought up with him, and I was daily his delight, 
rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the habit- 
able parts of the earth, and my delights were with the 
sons of men.' It is visible that Solomon speaks here 
of a time soon after the creation of the world, of a 
time when the earth was inhabited only by a pure, 
innocent race. Can this be said after the fall, when 
the earth was cursed ? It is only a profound igno- 
rance of the ancient, primitive tradition of preexist- 
ence that can make men mistake the true sense of 
this sublime text. 

" Our Saviour seems to approve the doctrine of pre- 
existence in his answer to his disciples when they in- 
terrogate him thus about the man born blind : ' Master, 
who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born 
blind ? ' * It is clear that this question would have 
been ridiculous and impertinent, if the disciples had 
not believed that the man born blind had sinned be- 
fore his corporeal birth, and, consequently, that he had 
preexisted in another state. Our Saviour's answer is 
remarkable : ' Neither hath this man sinned, nor his 
parents ; but that the works of God should be made 
manifest in him ! ' Jesus Christ could not mean that 
neither this man nor his parents had ever sinned, for 
this can be said of no mortal ; but the meaning is, that 
it was neither for the sins committed by this man in 
a state of preexistence, nor for those of his parents, 
that he was born blind, but in order to manifest one 
day the power of God. Our Lord, therefore, far 
from blaming and redressing this error in his disci- 
1 Gospel of John ix. 2. 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 85 

pies, answers in a way that seems to confirm them in 
the doctrine of preexistence. If he had looked upon 
this opinion as a capital error, would it have been 
compatible with his wisdom to pass it over so slightly, 
and taciturnly authorize it ? On the contrary, does 
not his silence indicate that he looked upon this doc- 
trine, which was a received maxim of the Jewish 
church, as the true explication of original sin ? 

" St. Paul says, in speaking of the origin of 
mortal and physical evil, ' By one man sin entered 
into the world, and death by sin ; and death passed 
upon all men, for that all have sinned.' 1 If all have 
sinned, then all have voluntarily cooperated with 
Adam in the breach of the eternal law: for where 
there is no deliberate act of will, there can be no 
sin. The Apostle does not say that Adam's sin was 
imputed to all. The doctrine of imputation, by which 
God attributes Adam's sin to his innocent posterity, 
cannot be the meaning of St. Paul, for, besides that 
this doctrine is incompatible with the divine perfec- 
tion, the Apostle adds : ' For as by one man's disobe- 
dience many were made sinners, so by the obedience 
of one shall all be made righteous.' 2 Now it is certain 
that men can only be made righteous by their per- 
sonal, deliberate, and voluntary cooperation with the 
spirit of grace, or the second Adam. The Apostle as- 
sures us in the same passage that ' all did not sin after 
the similitude of Adam's transgression.' This sin 
was really committed in a preexi stent state by the in- 
dividuals of the present human race. The meaning 
is that one pair gave the bad example, and all the 
human race co-existent with them in Paradise soon 
imitated this crime of disobedience against the eternal 
1 Romans v. 12. 2 Ibid. v. 19. 



86 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

law, by the false love of natural knowledge and sen- 
sible pleasure. St. Paul seems to confirm this when 
he says : 4 For the children being not yet born, having 
neither done good nor evil, it was said unto Rebecca, 
6 Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.' God's 
love and hatred depend upon the moral dispositions 
of the creature. Since God says that he loved Jacob 
and hated Esau ere they were born, and before they 
had done good or evil in this mortal life, it follows 
clearly that they must have preexisted in another state. 
This would have appeared to be the natural sense of 
the text, if prejudices imbibed from our infancy, more 
or less, had not blinded the mind of Christian doctors 
to the same degree as Judaical prejudices darkened 
those of the ancient Pharisees. 

" If it be said that these texts are obscure ; that 
preexistence is only drawn from them by induction, 
and that this opinion is* not revealed in Scripture by 
express words, I answer, that the doctrines of the 
immortality of the soul are nowhere revealed ex- 
pressly in the sacred oracles of the Old or New Tes- 
tament, but because all their morals and doctrines 
are founded upon these great truths. We may say 
the same of preexistence. The doctrine is nowhere 
expressly revealed, but it is evidently supposed, as 
without it original sin becomes not only inexplicable, 
but absurd, repugnant, and impossible. 

" There is nothing in the fathers nor councils that 
contradicts this doctrine ; yea, while the fifth general 
council and all the fathers after the sixth century con- 
demn a false idea of preexistence in which the an- 
cient tradition was adulterated by the Origenists and 
Priscillianists, the true doctrine of preexistence was 
not condemned by the church. This supposes that 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 87 

all the individuals of the human species composed of 
soul and body were created in Paradise, that they all 
cooperated in Adam's disobedience, partook of his 
crime, and so were justly punished. This was the 
constant tradition of the Jewish church, and confirmed 
by the Scriptures. This opinion of preexistence was 
also very ancient in the Christian church, ere the 
Origenists spoiled it with the Pythagorean and Pla- 
tonic fictions. 

" It is against the impious degradation of trans- 
migration [through animal bodies] that the fathers 
declaim, and not the true Scripture doctrine of de- 
graded [human] intelligences. This the schoolmen 
confound with the false disguises — mixtures of the 
pagans. This great principle is the true key by 
which we can understand the meaning of several pas- 
sages of Scripture, and the sense of many sublime ar- 
ticles of faith. Thus only can we shelter Christianity 
from the railleries of the increduloue." 

8. Among Soame Jenyns's "Disquisitions on Sev- 
eral Subjects " is a " Disquisition on a Praeexistent 
State," from which we quote the following : — 

" That mankind had existed in some state previous 
to the present was the opinion of the wisest sages of 
the most remote antiquity. It was held by the 
Gymnosophists of Egypt, the Brachmans of India, the 
Magi of Persia, and the greatest philosophers of 
Greece and Rome ; it was likewise adopted by the fa- 
thers of the Christian Church, and frequently enforced 
by her primitive writers. Why it has been so little no- 
ticed, so much overlooked rather than rejected, by the 
divines and metaphysicians of later ages, I am at a 
loss to account for, as it is undoubtedly confirmed by 
reason, by all the appearances of nature, and the doc- 
trines of revelation. 



88 BROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

" In the first place, then, it is confirmed by reason, 
which teaches us that it is impossible that the con- 
junction of a male and female can create, or bring into 
being, an immortal soul : they may prepare a material 
habitation for it, but there must be an immaterial 
preexistent inhabitant ready to take possession. Rea- 
son assures us that an immortal soul, which will eter- 
nally exist after the dissolution of the body, must have 
eternally existed before the formation of it ; for what- 
ever has no end can never have had any beginning, 
but must exist in some manner which bears no rela- 
tion to time, to us totally incomprehensible ; if, there- 
fore, the soul will continue to exist in a future life, it 
must have existed in a former. Reason likewise tells 
us that an omnipotent and benevolent Creator would 
never have formed such a world as this, and filled it 
with inhabitants, if the present was the only, or even 
the first, state of their existence, a state which, if un- 
connected with the past and the future, seems calcu- 
lated for no one purpose intelligible to our understand- 
ings ; neither of good or evil, of happiness or misery, 
of virtue or vice, of reward or punishment, but a con- 
fused jumble of them all together, proceeding from no 
visible cause and tending to no end. But, as we are 
certain that infinite power cannot be employed without 
effect, nor infinite wisdom without design, we may ra- 
tionally conclude that this world could be designed as 
nothing more than a prison, in which we are awhile 
confined to receive punishment for the offenses com- 
mitted in a former, and an opportunity of preparing 
ourselves for the enjoyment of happiness in a future, 
life. 

" Secondly, these conclusions of reason are suffi- 
ciently confirmed by the force of nature and the ap- 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 89 

pearance of things. This world is evidently formed 
for a place of punishment as well as probation, — a 
prison, or house of correction, to which we are com- 
mitted, some for a longer, and some for a shorter 
time ; some to the severest labor, others to more in- 
dulgent tasks ; and if we consider it under this char- 
acter, we shall perceive it admirably fitted for the 
end for which it was intended. It is a spacious, 
beautiful, and durable structure; it contains many 
various apartments, a few very comfortable, many 
tolerable, and some extremely wretched ; it is inclosed 
with a fence so impassable that none can surmount 
it but with the loss of life. Its inhabitants likewise 
exactly resemble those of other prisons : they come in 
with malignant dispositions and unruly passions, from 
whence, like other confined criminals, they receive 
great part of their punishment by abusing and injur- 
ing each other. As we may suppose that they have 
not all been equally guilty, so they are not all equally 
miserable ; the majority are permitted to procure a 
tolerable subsistence by their labor, and pass through 
their confinement without any extraordinary penalties, 
except, from paying their fees at their discharge by 
death. Others, who perhaps stand in need of more 
severe chastisement, receive it by a variety of meth- 
ods, some by the most tedious pains and diseases; 
some by disappointments, and many by success in their 
favorite pursuits; some by being condemned to situa- 
tions peculiarly unfortunate, as to those of extreme 
poverty or superabundant riches, of despicable man- 
ners or painful preeminence, of galley-slaves in a des- 
potic, or ministers in a free, country. 

" Lastly, the opinion of preexistence is no less con- 
firmed by revelation than by reason and the appear- 



90 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

ance of things ; for although, perhaps, it is nowhere in 
the New Testament explicitly enforced, yet through- 
out the whole tenor of those writings it is every- 
where implied. In them mankind are constantly rep- 
resented as coming into the world under a load of 
guilt, — as condemned criminals, the children of wrath, 
and objects of divine indignation, placed in it for a 
time by the mercies of God, to give them an oppor- 
tunity of expiating their guilt by sufferings, and regain- 
ing by a pious and virtuous conduct their lost estate 
of happiness and innocence ; this is styled working out 
their salvation, not preventing their condemnation, for 
that is already past, and their only hope now is re- 
demption, that is, being rescued from a state of captiv- 
ity and sin, in which they are universally involved. 
This is the very essence of the Christian dispensation, 
and the grand principle in which it differs from the 
religion of nature ; in every other respect they are 
nearly similar. They both enjoin the same moral du- 
ties and prohibit the same vices ; but Christianity ac- 
quaints us that we are admitted into this life oppressed 
by guilt and depravity, w T hich we must atone for by 
suffering its usual calamities, and work off by acts of 
positive virtue, before we can hope for happiness in 
another. Now, if by all this a preexistent state is 
not constantly supposed, in which this guilt was in- 
curred and this depravity contracted, there can be no 
meaning at all, or such a meaning as contradicts every 
principle of common sense, — that guilt can be con- 
tracted without acting, or that we can act without ex- 
isting. So undeniable is this inference that it renders 
any positive assertion of a preexistent state totally 
useless ; as, if a man at the moment of his entrance 
into a new country was declared a criminal, it would 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 91 

surely be unnecessary to assert that he had lived in 
some other before he came there. 

" In all our researches into abstruse subjects there 
is a certain clue, without which, the further we proceed 
the more we are bewildered ; but which, being fortu- 
nately discovered, leads us at once through the whole 
labyrinth, puts an end to our difficulties, and opens a 
system perfectly clear, consistent, and intelligible. 
The doctrine of preexistence, or the acknowledgment 
of some past state of disobedience, I take to be this very 
clue ; which, if we constantly carry along with us, we 
shall proceed unembarrassed through all the intricate 
mysteries both of nature and revelation, and at last 
arrive at so clear a prospect of the wise and just dis- 
pensations of our Creator, as cannot fail to afford com- 
plete, satisfaction to the most inquisitive skeptic. 

" Thus is a preexistent state, I think, clearly de- 
monstrated by the principles of reason, the appear- 
ance of things, and the sense of revelation ; all which 
agree that this world is intended for a place of punish- 
ment, as well as probation, and must therefore refer 
to some former period. For as probation implies a fu- 
ture life, for which it is preparatory, so punishment 
must imply a former state, in which offenses were com- 
mitted for which it is due ; and indeed there is not a 
single argument drawn from the justice of God, and 
the seemingly undeserved sufferings of many in the 
present state, which can be urged in proof of a future 
life, which proves not with superior force the existence 
of another which is already past." 

9. One of the chapters in Joseph Glanvil's " Lux 
Orientalis," a treatise attempting to demonstrate the 
truth of Platonic preexistence, and strengthened by 
the elaborate annotations of Dr. Henry More, is an 
extension of the following — ■ 



92 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

"Seven Pillars on which the Hypothesis of Preexist* 
ence stands. 

" 1. All the divine designs and actions are carried 
on by pure and infinite goodness. 

" 2. There is an exact geometrical justice that runs 
through the universe, and is interwoven in the con- 
texture of things. 

"3. Things are carried to their proper place and 
state by the congruity of their natures; where this 
fails we may suppose some arbitrary management. 

" 4. The souls of men are capable of living in other 
bodies besides terrestrial ; and never act but in some 
body or other. 

" 5. The soul in every state hath such a body as is 
fittest to those faculties and operations that it is most 
inclined to exercise. 

" 6. The powers and faculties of the soul are either 
spiritual or intellectual, or sensitive or plastic. 

" 7. By the same degrees that the higher powers are 
invigorated, the lower are abated, as to their proper 
exercise." 

10. In Dowden's " Life of Shelley " (vol. i. p. 80), 
the following anecdote of the poet is quoted from his 
friend Hogg : " One morning we had been reading 
Plato together so diligently that the usual hour of 
exercise passed away unperceived. We sallied forth 
hastily to take the air for half an hour before dinner. 
In the middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman 
with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive 
at that instant to our conduct in a life that was past or 
to come than to a decorous regulation of his behavior 
according to the established usages of society. With 
abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The 
mother, who well might fear that it was about to be- 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. W 

thrown over the parapet of the bridge into the sedgy 
waters below, held it f^st by its long train. 'Will 
your baby tell us anything about preexistence, 
madam ? ' he asked in a piercing voice and with a wist- 
ful look. The mother made no answer, but perceiving 
that Shelley's object was not murderous, but alto- 
gether harmless, she dismissed her apprehension and 
relaxed her* hold. ' Will your baby tell us anything 
about preexistence, madam ? ' he repeated, with un- 
abated earnestness. ' He cannot speak, sir,' said the 
mother seriously. ' Worse, worse,' cried Shelley with 
an air of disappointment, shaking his long hair most 
pathetically about his young face. * But surely the 
babe can speak if he will, for he is only a few weeks 
old. He may fancy that he cannot, but it is only a 
silly whim. He cannot have forgotten the use of 
speech in so short a time. The thing is absolutely 
impossible.' ' It is not for me to dispute with you, 
gentlemen,' the woman meekly replied, 'but I can 
safely declare I never heard him speak, nor any 
child of his age.' It was a fine placid boy. So far 
from being disturbed by the interruption, he looked up 
and smiled. Shelley pressed his fat cheeks with his 
fingers. We commended his healthy appearance and 
his equanimity, and the mother was allowed to proceed, 
probably to her satisfaction, for she would doubtless 
prefer a less speculative nurse. Shelley sighed as we 
walked on. ; How provokingly close are these new- 
born babes ! ' he ejaculated ; ' but it is not the less 
certain, notwithstanding the cunning attempts to con- 
ceal the truth, that all knowledge is reminiscence. 
The doctrine is far more ancient than the times of 
Plato, and as old as the venerable allegory that the 
muses are the daughters of memory ; not one of the 
muses was ever said to be the child of invention.' " 



~- PROSM tr Rl j. EliS Ol\ ±k.£Lliy\JJLlil\JLTlUJN, 

11. Hume's skeptical essay on "The Immortality 
of the Soul " argues thus : — 

" Reasoning from the common course of nature, and 
without supposing any new interposition of the su- 
preme cause, which ought always to be excluded from 
philosophy, what is incorruptible must also be ungen- 
erable. The soul, therefore, if immortal, existed be- 
fore our birth, and if the former e^tenee noways 
concerns us, neither will the latter. . . . 

" The metempsychosis is, therefore, the only system 
of this kind that philosophy can hearken to. ' 

12. Southey says in his published " Letters " : "I 
have a strong and lively faith in a state of continued 
consciousness from this stage of existence, and that we 
shall recover the consciousness of some lower stages 
through which we may previously have passed seems 
to me not impossible. . . . 

" The system of progressive existence seems, of all 
others, the most benevolent ; and all that we do under- 
stand is so wise and so good, and all we do or do not, 
so perfectly and overwhelmingly wonderful, that the 
most benevolent system is the most probable." 

13. From a letter written by that curious genius 
William Blake (the artist) to his friend John Flax- 
man (the sculptor) : 1 — 

" In my brain are studies and chambers filled with 
books and pictures of old which I wrote and painted 
in ages of eternity before my mortal life ; and these 
works are the delight and study of archangels. 

" You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel, 
my friend and companion from eternity. I look back 
into the regions of reminiscence and behold our an- 
cient days before this earth appeared and its vegeta- 
1 See Scoones's English Letters, p. 361. 



tive mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes. I see our 
houses of eternity which can never be separated, 
though our mortal vehicles should stand at the re- 
motest corners of heaven from each other." 

14. In the " Fortnightly Review " for September, 
1878, Professor William Knight writes: "It seems 
surprising that in the discussions of contemporary phi- 
losophy on the origin and destiny of the soul there 
has been no explicit revival of the doctrines of Pre- 
existence and Metempsychosis. Whatever may be 
their intrinsic worth or evidential value, their title to 
rank on the roll of philosophical hypotheses is un- 
doubted. They offer quite as remarkable a solution 
of the mystery which all admit as the rival theories 
of Creation, Traduction, and Extinction." 

" If we reject the doctrine of Preexistence, we must 
either believe in non-existence or fall back in one or 
other of the two opposing theories of Creation and 
Traduction ; and as we reject Extinction, we may find 
Preexistence has fewer difficulties to face than the 
rival hypotheses. Creation is the theory that every 
moment of time multitudes of souls are simultaneously 
born, — not sent down from a celestial source, but 
freshly made out of nothing and placed in bodies pre- 
pared for them by natural growth. To the Platonist 
the theory of Traduction seemed even worse, as it im- 
plied the derivation of the soul from at least two 
sources, — from both parents, — and a substance thus 
derived was apparently composite and quasi-material. 

" Stripped of all extravagance and expressed in the 
modest terms of probability, the theory has immense 
speculative interest and great ethical value. It is 
much to have the puzzle of the origin of evil thrown 
back for an indefinite number of cycles of lives; to 






have a workable explanation of Nemesis, and of what 
we are accustomed to call the moral tragedies and the 
untoward birth of a multitude of men and women. 
It is much also to have the doctrine of immortality 
lightened of its difficulties ; to have our immediate out- 
look relieved by the doctrine that in the soul's eternity 
its pre existence and its future existence are one. The 
retrospect may assuredly help the prospect." 

" Whether we make use of it or not, we ought to 
realize its alternatives. They are these. Either all 
life is extinguished and resolved through an absorp- 
tion and reassumption of the vital principle every- 
where, or a perpetual miracle goes on in the inces- 
sant and rapid increase in the amount of spiritual ex- 
istence within the universe ; and while human life sur- 
vives, the intelligence and the affection of the lower 
animals perish everlastingly." 

15. Professor W. A. Butler's celebrated lectures 
upon " The History of Ancient Philosophy " lean 
strongly toward an endorsement of Plato's philosophy 
of reincarnation : — 

" It must be allowed that there is much in the hy- 
pothesis of preexistence (at least) which might at- 
tract a speculator busied with the endeavor to reduce 
the moral system of the world under intelligible laws. 
The solution which it at once furnishes of the state 
and fortunes of each individual, as arising in some un- 
known but direct process from his own voluntary acts, 
though it throws, of course, no light on the ultimate 
question of the existence of moral evil (which it only 
removes a single step), does yet contribute to satisfy 
the mind as to the equity of that immediate manifesta- 
tion of it, and of its physical attendants, which we un- 
happily witness. There is internally no greater irn<- 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. \) i 

probability that the present may be the result of a 
former state now almost wholly forgotten, than that 
the present should be followed by a future form of 
existence in which, perhaps, or in some departments 
of which, the oblivion may be as complete. And if to 
that future state there are already discernible faint 
longings and impulses which to many men have 
seemed to involve a direct proof of its reality, hopes 
that will not be bounded by the grave, and desires 
that grasp eternity, others have found within them, it 
would seem, faint intimations scarcely less impressive 
of the past, as if the soul vibrated the echoes of a 
harmony not of this world. Wordsworth has told us 
that such convictions seem to be a part, though a neg- 
lected part, of the heritage of our race/' 

16. The novelist Bulwer thus expresses his opinion 
of this truth : " Eternity may be but an endless series 
of those migrations which men call deaths, abandon- 
ments of home after home, even to fairer scenes and 
loftier heights. Age after age the spirit may shift 
its tent, fated not to rest in the dull Elysium of the 
heathen, but carrying with it evermore its two ele- 
ments, activity and desire." 1 

17. Pezzani, the author of " The Plurality of the 
Soul's Lives," 2 writes : " The earthly sojourn is only 
a new probation, as was said by Dupont de Nemours, 
that great writer who, in the eighteenth century, out- 
stripped all modern thought. Now, if this be so, is it 
not plain that the recollection of former lives would 
seriously hinder probations, by removing most of their 
difficulties, and consequently of their deserts, as well 
as of their spontaneity? We live in a world where 

1 Other extracts from Bulwer appear on page 37. 

2 Paris, 1865, third edition, p. 405. 



free-will is all-powerful, the inviolable law of advance- 
ment and progress among men. If past lives were 
remembered, the soul would know the significance and 
import of the trials which are reserved for it here be- 
low : indolent and careless, it would harden itself 
against the purposes of Providence, and become 
paralyzed by the hopelessness of mastering them, or 
even, if of a better quality and more manly, it would 
accept and work them out without fail. Well, neither 
of these suppositions is necessary ; the struggle must 
be free, voluntary, safe from the influences of the past ; 
the field of combat must seem new, so that the athlete 
may exhibit and practice his virtues upon it. The ex- 
perience he has already acquired, the forces he has 
learned how to conquer, serve him in the new strife ; 
but in such a manner that he does not suspect it, for 
the imperfect soul undergoes reincarnations in order 
to develop the qualities that it has already manifested, 
to free itself from the vices and faults which are in 
opposition to the ascensional law. What would hap- 
pen if all men remembered their former lives ? The 
order of the earth would be overthrown ; at least, it is 
not now established on such conditions. Lethe, as 
well as free-will, is a law of the actual world." 

18. One of Emerson's earliest essays (" The 
Method of Nature ") contains this paragraph : " We 
cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but 
we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if these 
wonderful qualities which- house to-day in this mortal 
frame shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a 
similar frame, or whether they have before had a nat- 
ural history like that of this body you see before you ; 
but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not 
now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sick- 



W-.J.-..V... 1 JLM JL J. V/XT • 



,9 



ness nor buried in my grave; but that they circu- 
late through the universe : before the world was, they 
were. Nothing can bar them out, or shut them in, 
but they penetrate the ocean and land, space and 
time, form and essence, and hold the key to universal 
nature." 

Again, in one of his latest works (on " Immortal- 
ity ") he says : " The fable of the Wandering Jew is 
agreeable to men, became they want more time and 
land*in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher 
poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us as 
we are, with our experience, and transfer us to a new 
planet, and let us digest for its inhabitants what we 
can of the wisdom of this. After we have found 
our depth there, and assimilated what we can of the 
new experience, transfer us to a new scene. In each 
transfer we shall have acquired, by seeing them at a 
distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which 
we were too much immersed." 1 

19. James Freeman Clarke writes (in " Ten Great 
Religions," ii. 190) : " That man has come up to his 
present state of development by passing through lower 
forms is the popular doctrine of science to-day. What 
is called evolution teaches that we have reached our 
present state by a very long and gradual ascent from 
the lowest animal organizations. It is true that the 
Darwinian theory takes no notice of the evolution of 
the soul, but only of the body. But it appears to me 
that a combination of the two views would remove 
many difficulties which still attach to the theory of 
natural selection and the survival of the fittest. If 
we are to believe in evolution, let us have the assist- 

1 Other quotations from Emerson are on pages 23, 277, 312, 324. 



100 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

ance of the soul itself in this development of new 
species. Thus science and philosophy will cooperate, 
nor will poetry hesitate to lend her aid." 

20. The noblest work of modern times, and prob- 
ably of all time, upon immortality, is a large volume 
by the Rev. William R. Alger, entitled " A Critical 
History of the Doctrine of a Future Life." It was 
published in 1860, and still remains the standard au- 
thority upon that topic throughout Christendom. This 
little book is substantially indebted to it. The author 
is a Unitarian minister, who devoted half his lifetime 
to the work, undermining his health thereby. In the 
first edition (1860) the writer characterizes reincar- 
nation as a plausible delusion, unworthy of credence. 
For fifteen years more he continued studying the sub- 
ject, and the last edition (1878) gives the final result 
of his ripest investigations in heartily endorsing and 
advocating reincarnation. No more striking argu- 
ment for the doctrine could be advanced than this 
fact. That a Christian clergyman, making the prob- 
lem of the soul's destiny his life's study, should be- 
come so overpowered by the force of this pagan idea 
as to adopt it for the climax of his scholarship is 
extremely significant. And the result is reached by 
such a sincere course of reasoning that the seminaries 
in all denominations are compelled to accept his book 
as the masterpiece. From one of the supplemental 
chapters we quote the following by his permission : — 

" Besides the various distinctive arguments of its 
own, every reason for the resurrection holds with at 
least equal force for transmigration. The argument 
from analogy is especially strong. It is natural to 
argue from the universal spectacle of incarnated life 
that this is the eternal scheme everywhere, the variety 






PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 101 

of souls finding in the variety of worlds an everlasting 
series of adventures in appropriate organisms ; there 
being, as Paul said, one kind of flesh of birds, another 
of beasts, another of men, another of angels, and so 
on. Our present lack of recollection of past lives is 
no disproof of their actuality. Every night we lose 
all knowledge of the past, but every day we reawaken 
to a memory of the whole series of days and nights. 
So in one life we may forget or dream, and in another 
recover the whole thread of experience from the be- 
ginning. 

" In every event, it must be confessed that of all 
the thoughtful and refined forms of the belief in a 
future life none has had so extensive and prolonged a 
prevalence as this. It has the vote of the majority, 
having for ages on ages been held by half the human 
race with an intensity of conviction almost without a 
parallel. Indeed, the most striking fact about the 
doctrine of the repeated incarnations of the soul, its 
form and experience in each successive embodiment 
being determined by its merits and demerits in the 
preceding ones, is the constant reappearance of that 
faith in all parts of the world, and its permanent hold 
on certain great nations. 

" Another striking fact connected with this doctrine 
is that it seems to be a native and ineradicable growth 
of the oriental world, but appears in the western 
world only in scattered instances, and rather as an 
exotic form of thought. In the growing freedom and 
liberality of thought, which, no less than its doubt and 
denial, now characterize Christendom, it seems as if 
the full time had come for a greater mental and aes- 
thetic hospitality on the part of Christians towards 
Hindus. The advocates of the resurrection should 



102 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

not confine their attention to the repellant or the lu- 
dicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to 
its claim and its charm." 

After reviewing and strengthening the evidences in 
favor of plural births, Mr. Alger continues : " The 
above translation of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the 
resurrection into a form scientifically credible, and rec- 
onciled with the immemorial tenet of transmigration, 
may seem to some a fanciful speculation, a mere in- 
tellectual toy. Perhaps it is so. It is not propounded 
with the slightest dogmatic animus. It is advanced 
solely as an illustration of what may possibly be true, 
as suggested by the general evidence of the phenom- 
ena of history and the facts of experience. The 
thoughts embodied in it are so wonderful, the method 
of it so rational, the region of contemplation into 
which it lifts the mind is so grand, the prospects it 
opens are of such universal reach and import, that 
the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the 
sublime scope of the idea of immortality, and of a 
cosmopolitan vindication of Providence uncovered to 
every eye. It takes us out of the littleness of petty 
themes and selfish affairs, and makes it easier for us 
to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever 
known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions 
of human destiny to seem simply proportional to the 
native magnitude and beauty of the powers of the 
mind which can conceive such things. After traversing 
the grounds here set forth, we feel that if the view 
based on them be not the truth, it must be because 
God has in reserve for us a sequel greater and love- 
lier, not meaner, than our brightest dream hitherto/' 

21. In the " Princeton Review " for May, 1881, Pro 
fessor Francis Bowen (of Harvard University) pub- 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 103 

lishes a very interesting article on " Christian Metemp- 
sychosis/' in which he urges the Christian acceptance 
of reincarnation. By his consent we quote a large 
portion of it, because it is so able an appeal for the 
adoption of this truth, from both a metaphysical and 
a Christian standpoint : — 

" Our life upon earth is rightly held to be a disci- 
pline and a preparation for a higher and eternal life 
hereafter. But if limited to the duration of a single 
mortal body, it is so brief as to seem hardly sufficient 
for so grand a purpose. Threescore years and ten 
must surely be an inadequate preparation for eternity. 
But what assurance have we that the probation of the 
soul is confined within so narrow limits ? Why may 
it not be continued, or repeated, through a long series 
of successive generations, the same personality animat- 
ing one after another an indefinite number of tene- 
ments of flesh, and carrying forward into each the 
training it has received, the character it has formed, 
the temper and dispositions it has indulged, in the 
stage of existence immediately preceding? It need 
not remember its past history, even while bearing the 
fruits and the consequences of that history deeply in- 
grained into its present nature. How many long pas- 
sages of any one life are now completely lost to mem- 
ory, though they may have contributed largely to build 
up the heart and the intellect which distinguish one man 
from another ! Our responsibility surely is not les- 
sened by such forgetfulness. We are still accountable 
for the misuse of time, though we have forgotten how 
or on what we wasted it. We are even now reaping 
the bitter fruits, through enfeebled health and vitiated 
desires and capacities, of many forgotten acts of self- 
indulgence, willfulness, and sin — forgotten just be- 



oq 



104 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

cause they were so numerous. Then a future life 
even in another frail body upon this earth may well be 
a state of just and fearful retribution. 

" Why should it be thought incredible that the 
same soul should inhabit in succession an indefinite 
number of mortal bodies, and thus prolong its experi- 
ence and its probation till it has become in every sense 
ripe for heaven or the final judgment ? Even dur- 
ing this one life our bodies are perpetually changing, 
though by a process of decay and restoration which is 
so gradual that it escapes our notice. Every human 
being thus dwells successively in many bodies, even 
during one short life. This physiological fact seems 
to have been known by Plato, as in a well-known pas- 
sage of the Phsedo, a clear statement of it is put into 
the mouth of Cebes, who argues, however, that this 
fact affords no sufficient proof of the immortality of 
the soul. ' You may say with reason,' Cebes is made 
to argue, c that the soul is lasting, and the body weak 
and short-lived in comparison. And every soul may 
be said to wear out many bodies, especially in the 
course of a long life. For if, while the man is alive, 
the body deliquesces and decays, and yet the soul al- 
ways weaves her garment anew and repairs the waste, 
then of course, when the soul perishes, she must have 
on her last garment, and this only will survive her ; 
but then, again, when the soul is dead, the body will 
at last show its native weakness and soon pass into de- 
cay.' And again : ' Suppose we admit also that, after 
death, the souls of some are existing still, and will 
exist, and will be born and die again and again, and 
that there is a natural strength in the soul which will 
hold out and be born many times, — for all this, we 
may still be inclined to think that she will be weary 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 105 

in the labors of successive births, and may at last suc- 
cumb in one of her deaths and utterly perish.' 2 

" If every birth were an act of absolute creation, 
the introduction to life of an entirely new creature, 
we might reasonably ask why different souls are so 
variously constituted at the outset. We do not all 
start fair in the race that is set before us, and there- 
fore all cannot be expected, at the close of one brief 
mortal pilgrimage, to reach the same goal, and to be 
equally well fitted for the blessings or the penalties of 
a fixed state hereafter. The commonest observation 
assures us that one child is born with limited capaci- 
ties and perhaps a wayward disposition, strong pas- 
sions, and a sullen temper ; that he has tendencies to 
evil which are almost sure to be soon developed. An- 
other, on the contrary, seems happily endowed from 
the start ; he is not only amiable, tractable, and kind, 
but quick-witted and precocious, a child of many hopes. 
The one seems a perverse goblin, while the other has 
the early promise of a Cowley or a Pascal. The dif- 
ferences of external condition also are so vast and ob- 
vious that they seem to detract much from the merit 
of a well-spent life and from the guilt of vice and 
crime. One is so happily nurtured in a Christian 
home, and under so many protecting influences, that 
the path of virtue lies straight and open before him, — 
so plain, indeed, that even the blind could safely walk 
therein; while another seems born to a heritage of 
misery, exposure, and crime. The birthplace of one 
is in Central Africa, and of another in the heart of 
civilized and Christian Europe. Where lingers eter- 
nal justice then ? How can such frightful inequalities 
be made to appear consistent with the infinite wisdom 
and goodness of God ? 

1 Jowett's translation, Am. ed. vol. i. p. 416. 



106 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

" If metempsychosis is included in the scheme of 
the divine government of the world, this difficulty dis- 
appears altogether. Considered from this point of 
view, every one is born into the state which he has 
fairly earned by his own previous history. He carries 
with him from one stage of existence to another the 
habits or tendencies which he has formed, the disposi- 
tions which he has indulged, the passions which he has 
not chastised, but has voluntarily allowed to lead him 
into vice and crime. No active interference of retrib- 
utive justice is needed, except in selecting for the place 
of his new birth a home with appropriate surround- 
ings — perhaps such a home as through his evil pas- 
sions he has made for others. The doctrine of inher- 
ited sin and its consequences is a hard lesson to be 
learned. We submit with enforced resignation to the 
stern decree, corroborated as it is by every day's ob- 
servation of the ordinary course of this world's affairs, 
that the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon 
the children even to the third and fourth generation. 
But no one can complain of the dispositions and en- 
dowments which he has inherited, so to speak, from 
himself ; that is, from his former self in a previous 
stage of existence. If, for instance, he has neglected 
his opportunities and fostered his lower appetites in 
his childhood, if he was then wayward and self-indul- 
gent, indolent, deceitful, and vicious, it is right and 
just that, in his manhood and old age, he should expe- 
rience the bitter consequences of his youthful follies. 
If he has voluntarily made himself a brute, a brute he 
must remain. The child is father of the man, who 
often inherits from him a sad patrimony. There is 
an awful meaning, if we will but take it to heart, in 
the solemn announcement of the angel in the apoca- 



PROSE V/RITERS ON REINCARNATION. 107 

lyptic vision : ' He that is unjust, let him be unjust 
still ; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still ; 
and he ■ that is righteous, let him be righteous still ; 
and he that is holy, let him be holy still ! ' And it 
matters not, so far as the justice of the sentence is 
concerned, whether the former self, from whom we 
receive this heritage, was the child who, not many 
years ago, bore the same name with our present self, 
or one who bore a different name, who was born in 
another age and perhaps another hemisphere, and of 
whose sad history we have not now the faintest re- 
membrance. We know that our personal identity 
actually extends farther back, and links together more 
passages of our life, than what is now present to con- 
sciousness ; though it is true that we have no direct evi- 
dence of this continuity and sameness of being beyond 
what is attested by memory. But we may have indirect 
evidence of it from the testimony of others in the case of 
our own infancy, or from revelation, or through reason- 
ing from analogy and from the similarity of cases and 
characters. The soul, said the Hindoos, is in the body 
like a bird in a cage, or like a pilot who steers a ship, 
and seeks a new vessel when the old one is worn out. 

"Nothing prevents us, however, from believing that 
the probation of any one soul extends continuously 
through a long series of successive existences upon 
earth, each successive act in the whole life-history 
being retributive for what went before. For this is 
the universal law of being, whether of matter or mind ; 
everything changes, nothing dies in the sense of being 
annihilated. What we call death is only the resolu- 
tion of a complex body into its constituent parts, noth- 
ing that is truly one and indivisible being lost or de- 
stroyed in the process. In combustion or any other 



108 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

rapid chemical change, according to the admission of 
the materialists themselves, not an atom of matter is 
ever generated or ever ceases to be ; it only escapes 
from one combination to enter upon another. Then 
the human soul, which, as we know from conscious- 
ness, is absolutely one and indivisible, only passes on 
after the dissolution of what was once its home to ani- 
mate another body. In this sense we can easily accept 
the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Our 
future life is not, at any rate not while the present 
administration of this world's affairs continues, to be 
some inconceivable form of merely spiritual being. It 
will be clothed again with a body, which may or may 
not be in part the same with the one which it has just 
left. Leibnitz held that the soul is never entirely di- 
vorced from matter, but carries on some portion of 
what was its earthly covering into a subsequent stage 
of existence. . . . We can easily imagine and believe 
that every person now living is a representation of some 
one who lived perhaps centuries ago under another 
name, in another country, it may be not with the same 
line of ancestry, and yet one and the same with him 
in his inmost being and essential character. His sur- 
roundings are changed; the old house of flesh has 
been torn down and rebuilt ; but the tenant is still the 
same. He has come down from some former genera- 
tion, bringing with him what may be either a help or 
a hindrance ; namely, the character and tendencies 
which he there formed and nurtured. And herein is 
retribution ; he has entered upon a new stage of pro- 
bation, and in it he has now to learn what the charac- 
ter which he there formed naturally leads to when tried 
upon a new and perhaps broader theatre. If this be 
not so, tell me why men are born with characters. s« 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 109 

unlike and with tendencies so depraved. In a sense 
far more literal than was intended by the poet, it may- 
be true of every country churchyard, that 

1 Some mute inglorious Milton there may rest, 
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. 5 

They bring with them no recollection of the incidents 
of their former life, as such memory would unfit them 
for the new part which they have to play. But they 
are still the same in the principles and modes of con- 
duct, in the inmost springs of action, which the for- 
gotten incidents of their former life have developed 
and strengthened. They are the same in all the es- 
sential points which made them formerly a blessing or 
a curse to all with whom they came immediately in 
contact, and through which they will again become 
sources of weal or woe to their environment. Of 
course, these inborn tendencies may be either exagger- 
ated or chastised by the lessons of a new experience, 
by the exercise of reflection, and by habitually heeding 
or neglecting the monitions of conscience. But they 
still exist as original tendencies, and as such they must 
make either the upward or the downward path more 
easy, more natural, and more likely to reach a goal so 
remote that it would otherwise be unattainable. 

14 To make this more clear, let me refer to the preg- 
nant distinction so admirably illustrated by Kant be- 
tween what he calls the Intelligible Character and the 
Empirical or acquired Character. The former is the 
primitive foundation on which the latter, which di- 
rectly determines our conduct for the time being, is 
built. To a great extent, though not entirely, we are 
what we are through the influence of what have been 
our surroundings — through our education, our com- 
panions, our habits, and our associations. But these 



110 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

influences must have had a primitive basis to work 
upon, and can only modify the operation of the native 
germs, not change their nature ; and they will modify 
these more or less profoundly according as they are 
more or less amenable to outside influences and mani- 
fest more or less decidedly a bias in one direction or 
another. What the future plant will be depends 
much more on the specific nature of the seed which is 
sown than on the fertility or barrenness of the soil into 
which it is cast. The latter only determine whether 
it shall be a vigorous plant or a weak one, whether in 
fact it shall grow at all or only rot in the ground ; but 
they do not determine the specific direction of its de- 
velopment, whether it shall be an oak, a willow, or an 
ivy-bush. The Empirical or acquired Character, as it 
is open to observation, is a phenomenon ; it is what 
the man appears to be, or what he has become under 
the shaping influence of the circumstances to which he 
has been exposed. But the Intelligible Character, the 
inmost kernel of his real being, is a noumenon, and es- 
capes external observation ; we can judge of its nature 
only indirectly from its effects ; that is to say, from 
the conduct which it has cooperated to produce. A 
change taking place in any substance must be the joint 
result of two factors ; namely, its proper cause operat- 
ing upon it from without, and the thing's own nature 
or internal constitution. Thus the same degree of 
heat acts very differently upon different substances, 
say, on wax, iron, water, clay, or powder. In like 
manner, a given motive, say, the desire of wealth, 
when acting on different persons, though with the same 
strength or intensity, may lead to very dissimilar re- 
sults ; it makes one man a thief and another a miser, 
renders one envious and another energetic and indus- 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. Ill 

trious. If frequently indulged, it forms a fixed habit, 
and thus becomes an element in the acquired or empir- 
ical character. 

u Now Kant, with the bias of a necessitarian, places 
our freedom and our responsibility in the realm of 
noumena, attributing them exclusively to our Intelli- 
gible Character. As to the acquired character when 
once formed, he says we must act in accordance with 
it, and therefore we are not accountable for the partic- 
ular act to which it led, since that we could not help. 
After I have once formed a habit of lying or stealing, 
should an opportunity and temptation recur, I must 
repeat the offense. But our inborn character, which 
expresses what we really are, as a noumenon, lies out- 
side of time, space, and causality, and therefore can- 
not be led astray by temptation or external circum- 
stances, but is entirely free. Herein solely consists 
our merit or our guilt. Hence Kant would make us 
responsible not for the particular crime, which we 
could not help committing, but for being such a person 
as to be capable of that crime. We are accountable 
not for what we do, but for what we are. We are to 
be punished not for stealing this horse, but for being 
a rogue, or thief in grain, for being naturally inclined 
to stealing. . . . 

" I know not how it may seem to others, but to me 
there is something inexpressibly consolatory and in- 
spiring in the thought that the great and good of other 
days have not finally accomplished their earthly career, 
have not left us desolate, but that they are still with us, 
in the flesh, though we know them not, and though 
in one sense they do not really know themselves, be- 
cause they have no remembrance of a former life in 
which they were trained for the work which they are 



112 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

now doing.. But they are essentially the same beings, 
for they have the same intellect and character as be- 
fore, and sameness in these two respects is all that 
constitutes our notion of personal identity. We are 
unwilling to believe that their beneficent activity was 
limited to one short life on earth, at the close of which 
there opened to them an eternity without change, 
without farther trial or action, and seemingly having 
no other purpose than unlimited enjoymtot. Such a 
conception of immortality is exposed to Schopenhauer's 
sarcasm, that if effort and progress are possible only 
in the present life, and no want or suffering can be 
endured except as the penalties of sin, there remains 
for heaven only the weariness of nothing to do. An 
eternity either of reward or punishment would seem 
to be inadequately earned by one brief period of pro- 
bation. It is far more reasonable to believe that the 
future life which we are taught to expect will be simi- 
lar to the present one, and will be spent in this world, 
though we shall carry forward to it the burden or the 
blessing entailed upon us by our past career. Besides 
the spiritual meaning of the doctrine of regeneration, 
besides the new birth which is 6 of water and of the 
Spirit,' there may be a literal meaning in the solemn 
words of the Saviour, ' Except a man be born again, 
he cannot see the kingdom of God.' . . • 

" I should be sorry to believe that that remarkable 
group of excellent scholars, thinkers, and divines, the 
Port-Royalists, who upheld the cause of Jansenism 
for three quarters of a century, have finally passed 
away from earth. On the contrary, if anywhere in 
these later times the model of a Christian scholar and 
historian could be found, we might well say that the 
spirit of Tillemont lives again in him. If we could 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 113 

find one who united in himself all the best qualities 
of a Christian teacher, stainless in heart and life, we 
might well believe that it was Lancelot in another 
earthly form. For either Pascal or Arnauld, it must 
be admitted that we should not know where to look ; 
if their spirits are yet in this world, they must be in 
the obscurity of some lowly station. 1 

" All this speculation, I repeat, is completely fanci- 
ful, and can serve no other purpose than to show, 
even if the doctrine of metempsychosis were true, that 
we should not be able to identify one person in any 
two of his successive appearances upon earth. We 
surely could not know of him in this respect any more 
than he know.s of himself ; and, as already said, the 
total break in memory at the beginning of every suc- 
cessive life must prevent the newly born from recog- 
nizing the oneness of his own being with any former 
existence in an earthly shape. 

" Curiously enough this want of self-knowledge is 
confessed in the only case in which we have a direct 
assertion in Scripture (if language is to be inter- 
preted in its ordinary literal meaning and not strained 
into a figurative sense), that one of the heroes of the 
olden time had reappeared upon earth under a new 
name, as the forerunner of a new dispensation. At 
the time of the Saviour there appears to have been a 
general expectation among the Jews that the coming 
of the Messiah was to be heralded by the reappear- 
ance upon earth of the prophet Elijah, this expecta- 
tion being founded upon the text in Malachi : ' Be- 
hold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the 
coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.' 

1 See Matthew Arnold's poem upon his father, Dr. Arnold, 
page 168. 



114 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

Early in the public ministry of John the Baptist, we 
read that the belief prevailed among his hearers that 
this prophecy was fulfilled in him. But when directly 
asked, ' Art thou Elias ? ' he replied, c I am not. Art 
thou that prophet ? And he answered, No.' He had 
no memory of his former life under that name ; and 
though he must have been aware of the popular belief 
upon the subject, and of the many points of similarity 
between his own career and that of the great restorer 
of the worship of the true God at an earlier period, 
he was too honest to claim an authority which he did 
not positive^ know to belong to him. 

" Yet we learn that our Lord subsequently twice 
declared, in very distinct language, that Elijah and 
John the Baptist were really one and the same person. 
Once, while John was still alive but in prison, Jesus 
told the multitude who thronged around him, fc Among 
them that are born of women there hath not risen a 
greater than John the Baptist ; ' and he directly 
goes on to assert, ' If ye will receive it, this is JElias, 
which was for to come.' (Matt. xi. 14.) And again, 
after John was beheaded, Jesus said to his disciples, 
' Elias is come already and they knew him not, but 
have done unto him whatsoever they listed.' 4 Then 
the disciples understood that he spake unto them of 
John the Baptist.' (Matt. xvii. 12, 13.) Still again, 
in the scene on the mount of Transfiguration. ' Behold 
there talked with him two men, which were Moses 
and Elias ; ' and it is said of the three disciples who 
were then in company with Jesus that, ' When they 
were awake, they saw his glory and the two men that 
stood with him.' (Luke ix. 30, 32.) That the com- 
mentators have not been willing to receive, in their 
obvious and literal meaning, assertions so direct and 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 115 

so frequently repeated as these, but have attempted 
to explain them away in a non-natural and metaphori- 
cal sense, is a fact which proves nothing but the exist- 
ence of an invincible prejudice against the doctrine 
of the transmigration of souls. . . . 

" Assuming the doctrine to be well founded, it is 
for every person to determine with what character he 
will leave the world at the close of one stage of his 
earthly being, believing that with this same character 
thus trained for weal or woe he is inevitably at once 
to begin a new life, and thus either to rise or fall 
farther than ever. It seems to me that the dogma of 
a future life, so prolonged through a countless succes- 
sion of other lives on earth until it becomes an im- 
mortality, is thus brought home to one with a force, a 
vividness and certainty, of which in no other form it 
is susceptible. It has been said that no prudent man, 
if the election were offered to him, would choose to 
live his present live over again ; and as he whom the 
world calls prudent does not usually cherish any lofty 
aspirations, the saying is probably true. We are all 
so conscious of the many errors and sins that we have 
committed that the retrospect is a saddening one ; 
and worldly wisdom would probably whisper, ' It is 
best to stop here, and not try such a career over 
again.' But every one would ardently desire a renewal 
of his earthly experience if assured that he could enter 
upon it under better auspices, if he believed that what 
we call death is not the end of all things even here 
below, but that the soul is then standing upon the 
threshold of a new stage of earthly existence, which 
is to be brighter or darker than the one it is just 
quitting, according as there is carried forward into it 
a higher or lower purpose, , . , 



116 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

" This doctrine also suggests, as it seems to me, a 
clearer and more satisfactory explanation than would 
otherwise be possible of the fall of man through dis- 
obedience and its consequences, as narrated in Genesis 
and interpreted by St. Paul. Certainly the primeval 
man, the Adam of each one of us, when he first 
through the inspiration of Deity 'became a living 
soul,' was born into a paradise, an Eden, of entire 
purity and innocence, and in that state he talked 
directly with God. There was also given to him 
through his conscience the revelation of a divine law, 
an absolute command, to preserve this blessed state 
through restraining his appetites and lower impulses 
to action, and making the love of holiness superior 
even to the love of knowledge. But man was tempted 
by his appetites to transgress this law ; he aspired 
after a knowledge of good and evil, which can be at- 
tained only through experience of evil, and he thereby 
fell from innocence into a state of sin, which neces- 
sarily corrupted his whole future being. The habit 
of disobedience once formed, sin in the same person 
has a self - continuing and self - multiplying power. 
The stain carried down from a former life becomes 
darker and more inveterate in the life that follows. 
We have no reason to complain of the corruption of 
human nature, for the world is what we have made 
it to be by our own act. The burden has not been 
transmitted to us by others, but has been inherited 
from ourselves ; that is, from our former selves. Re- 
demption from it by man's own effort thus became 
impossible. This is death, moral death, the only death 
of which a human soul is capable. 

" Thus far we have considered metempsychosis as 
a means of retribution ; that is, of awarding to each 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 117 

soul in the next future life upon which it is entering 
that compensation either of weal or woe which it has 
earned for itself, — has in fact necessarily entailed 
upon itself by its conduct in the life which it has just 
completed. But the transmigration of souls may be 
regarded also in another light, as that portion of the 
divine government of this world's affairs which main- 
tains distributive justice, since, through its agency, in 
the long run, all inequalities of condition and favoring 
or unfavoring circumstances may be compensated, 
and each person may have his or her equitable share 
of opportunities for good and of the requisite means 
for discipline and improvement. If our view be con- 
fined within the limits of a single earthly life, it must 
be confessed that the inequality is glaring enough, so 
that it seems to justify the honest doubts of the 
trembling inquirer, while it has offered a broad mark 
for the scoffs and declamation of the confirmed un- 
believer. 

" This hypothesis — and I do not claim for it any 
other character than that of a highly probable and 
consolatory hypothesis — also, throws a new and wel- 
come light upon the deep and dark problem of the 
origin of evil. In the first place, according to the 
views which have now been taken, the sufferings 
which are the immediate consequence and punishment 
of sin are properly left out of the account, since these 
evince the goodness of God no less than the happiness 
resulting from virtue, the purpose in both cases being 
to advance man's highest interests by the improvement 
of his moral character ; just as the affectionate parent 
rewards the obedience and punishes the faults of his 
child, love equally constraining him to adopt either 
course. And how many of the evils borne both by 



11.8 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

individuals and by communities are attributable di- 
rectly to their own misconduct, to their willful dis- 
regard of the monitions of conscience! The body 
which is now languid from inaction through sloth, 
and enfeebled or racked by disease, might have been 
active, vigorous, and sound, prompt to second every 
wish of its owner, and ministering to his enjoyment 
through every sense and limb. And could we know 
all, could we extend our vision over the whole history 
of our former self, how would our estimate of this 
purely retributive character of our present suffering 
be enlarged and confirmed ! It would then be evident 
that no portion of it is gratuitous or purposeless. And 
the community which is now torn with civil dissen- 
sion, desolated by war, or prostrated in an unequal 
strife with its rivals, might have been peaceful, afflu- 
ent, and flourishing, if rulers and ruled had heeded 
the stern calls of duty, instead of blindly following 
their own tumultuous passions. And as nations, too, 
have a continuous life, like that of a river, through a 
constant change of their constituent parts, many of 
their woes are clearly attributable to the misdeeds of 
their former selves. Once admit the great truth that 
virtue, not happiness, is man's highest interest, and 
most of the pains of this life indicate the goodness 
and justice of God quite as much as its pleasures. 

" But according to the theory which we are now con- 
sidering, a still larger deduction must be made from the 
amount of apparent evil at any one time visible in 
the world. All the inequalities in the lot of mankind, 
which have prompted what are perhaps the bitterest 
of all complaints, and have served skeptics like Hume 
and J. S. Mill as a reason for the darkest imputations 
upon divine justice in the government of the world, 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 119 

disappear from the picture altogether. Excepting 
only what we have just considered, the retributive 
consequences of more or less sin, there are no in- 
equalities. All start from the same point, and journey- 
through the same vicissitudes of existence, exhausting 
sooner or later all varieties of condition. Prince and 
peasant, bond and free, barbarian and cultured, all 
share alike whatever weal or woe there is in the world, 
because all must at some future time change places 
with each other. But after these two large deduc- 
tions from the amount complained of, what remains ? 
Very little, certainly, which we cannot even now see 
through ; that is, which we cannot assign an adequate 
reason for ; and to the eye of faith nothing remains. 
The world becomes a mirror which reflects without 
blot or shadow the infinite goodness of its Creator and 
Governor. Death remains ; but that is no evil, for 
what we call death is only the introduction to another 
life on earth, and if this be not a higher and better 
life than the one just ended, it is our own fault. Our 
life is really continuous, and the fact that the subse- 
quent stages of it lie beyond our present range of im- 
mediate vision is of no more importance, and no more 
an evil, than the corresponding fact that we do not 
now remember our previous existence in antecedent 
ages. Death alone, or in itself considered, apart from 
the antecedent dread of it which is irrational, and 
apart from the injury to the feelings of the survi- 
vors, which is a necessary consequence of that attach- 
ment to each other from which so much of our hap- 
piness springs, is not even an apparent evil ; it is 
mere change and development, like the passage from 
the embryonic to the adult condition, from the blos- 
som to the fruit." 



120 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

22. In " Ways of the Spirit, and other Essays," by 
Professor Frederick Henry Hedge, the twelfth chapter, 
upon " The Human Soul," strongly advocates rein- 
carnation. By the publishers' consent we reprint the 
pages referring to it : — 

" We reach back with our recollection and find no 
beginning of existence. Who of us knows anything 
except by report of the first two years of earthly life ? 
No one remembers the time when he first said * I,' 
or thought ' I.' We began to exist for others before 
we began to exist for ourselves. Our experience is 
not co-extensive with our being, and memory does not 
comprehend it. We bear not the root, but the root us. _ 

" What is the root ? We call it soul. Our soul, 
we call it ; properly speaking, it is not ours, but we 
are its. It is not a part of us, but we are a part of 
it. It is not one article in an inventory of articles 
which together make up our individuality, but the 
root of that individuality. It is larger than we are, 
and other than we are — that is, than our conscious 
self. The conscious self does not begin until some 
time after the birth of the individual. It is not aborig- 
inal, but a product, — as it were, the blossoming of 
an individuality. We may suppose countless souls 
which never bear this product, which never blossom 
into self. And *the soul which does so blossom exists 
before that blossom unfolds. 

" How long before, it is impossible to say ; whether 
the birth, for example, of a human individual is the 
soul's beginning to be ; whether a new soul is fur- 
nished to each new body, or the body given to a pre- 
existing soul. It is a question on which theology 
throws no light, and which psychology but faintly 
illustrates. But so far as that faint illustration reaches 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 121 

it favors the supposition of preexistence. That sup- 
position seems best to match the supposed continued 
existence of the soul hereafter. Whatever had a be- 
ginning in time, it should seem must end in time. 
The eternal destination which faith ascribes to the 
soul presupposes an eternal origin. On the other 
hand, if the preexistence of the soul were assured it 
would carry the assurance of immortality. 

" An obvious objection, and one often urged against 
this hypothesis, is the absence of any recollection of a 
previous life. If the soul existed before its union with 
this present organization, why does it never recall any 
circumstance, scene, or experience of its former state ? 
There have been those who professed to remember a 
past existence ; but without regarding those pre- 
tended reminiscences, or regarding them only as il- 
lusions, I answer that the previous existence may not 
have been a conscious existence. In that case there 
would have been no recorded experience, and conse- 
quently nothing to recall. But suppose a conscious 
existence antecedent to the present, the soul could not 
preserve the record of a former organization. The 
new organization with its new entries must necessarily 
efface the record of the old. For memory depends on 
the continuity of association. When the thread of 
that continuity is broken, the knowledge of the past 
is gone. If, in a state of unconsciousness, one were 
taken entirely out of his present surroundings ; if 
falling asleep in one set of circumstances, like Chris- 
topher Sly in the play, he w r ere to wake in another, 
were to wake to entirely new conditions ; especially if 
during that sleep his body were to undergo a change, 
— he would lose on waking all knowledge of the 
former life for want of a connecting link between it 



122 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

and the new. And this, according to the supposition, 
is precisely what has happened to the soul at birth. 
The birth into the present was the death of the old, — 
'a sleep and a forgetting.' The soul went to sleep 
in one body, it woke in a new. The sleep is a gulf of 
oblivion between the two. 

" And a happy thing, if the soul preexisted, it is 
for us that we remember nothing of its former life. 
The memory of a past existence would be a drag on 
the present, engrossing our attention much to the pre- 
judice of this life's interests and claims. The back- 
ward-looking soul would dwell in the past instead of 
the present, and miss the best uses of life. 

" But though on the supposition of a former exist- 
ence the soul would not be likely to preserve the 
record of that existence, it would nevertheless retain 
the effect. It would not, on assuming its present 
conditions, be as though it had never before been. Its 
past experience would essentially modify it ; it would 
take a character from its former state. If a moral 
and intellectual being, it would bring into the world 
of its present destination certain tendencies and dis- 
positions, the growth of a previous life. And thus 
the moral law and the moral nature of the soul would 
assert themselves with retributions transcending the 
limits of a single existence, and reaching on from life 
to life of the pilgrim soul. 

"It is commonly conceded that there are native 
differences of character in men, — different propensi- 
ties, tempers, not wholly explained by difference of 
circumstances or education. They show themselves 
where circumstances and education have been the 
same ; they seem to be innate. These are sometimes 
ascribed to organization. But organization is not 



PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION, 123 

final. That, again, requires to be explained. Accord- 
ing to my thinking, it is the soul that makes organiza- 
tion, not organization the soul. The supposition of a 
previous existence would best explain these differences 
as something carried over from life to life, — the 
harvest of seed that was sown in other states, and 
whose fruit remains, although the sowing is remem- 
bered no more. 

" This was the theory of the most learned and acute 
of the Christian Fathers (Origen), and though never 
adopted and sanctioned by the church, has been oc- 
casionally revived in later time. Of all the theories re- 
specting the origin of the soul it seems to me the most 
plausible, and therefore the one most likely to throw 
light on the question of a life to come." 

23. Sir Humphry Davy, in his " Consolations in 
Travel " (Dialogue IV., The Proteus or Immortality), 
arguing for the necessity of the continuance of some 
kind of a body for the human spirit after death, says : 

" The external world is to us nothing but a cluster 
of sensations, and in looking back to the memory of 
our being we find one principle which may be called 
the monad or self, constantly present, intimately asso- 
ciated with a particular class of sensations, which we 
call our body, or organs. These organs are connected 
with other sensations, and move, as it were, with them 
in circles of existence, quitting for a time some trains 
of sensation to return to others, but the monad is al- 
ways present. We can fix no beginning to its opera- 
tions, we can place no limit to them. We sometimes 
in sleep lose the beginning and end of a dream, and 
recollect the middle of it, and one dream has no con- 
nection with another, and yet we are conscious of an 
infinite variety of dreams, and there is a strong anal- 



124 PROSE WRITERS ON REINCARNATION. 

ogy for believing in an infinity of past existences 
which must have been connected ; and human life 
may be regarded as a type of infinite and immortal 
life, and its succession of sleep and dreams as a type 
of the changes of death and birth to which from its 
nature it is liable. . . . The whole intellect is a history 
of change, according to a certain law, and we retain the 
memory only of those changes which may be useful to 
us. The child forgets what happened to it in the 
womb. The recollections of the infant likewise, be- 
fore two years, are soon lost ; yet many of the habits 
acquired in that age are retained for life. The senti- 
ent principle gains thoughts by material instruments, 
and its sensations change as those instruments change ; 
and in old age the mind, as it were, falls asleep, to 
awake in a new existence. With its present organ- 
ization the intellect of man is naturally limited and 
imperfect, but this depends upon its material machin- 
ery, and in a higher organized form it may be im- 
agined to possess infinitely higher powers. It does 
not, however, appear improbable to me that some of 
the more refined machinery of thought may adhere, 
even in another state, to the sentient principle, for 
though the organs of gross sensation, the nerves and 
brain, are destroyed by death, yet something of the 
more ethereal value may be less destructible, and I 
sometimes imagine that many of those powers which 
have been called instinctive belong to the more re- 
fined clothing of the spirit. Conscience, indeed, seems 
to have some indefined source, and may bear relations 
to a former state of being." 



V. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION IN WESTERN 
LITERATURE. 



Poets, the first instructors of mankind. — Horace. 

Poets are the truest diviners of nature. — Bulwer-Lytton. 

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves un- 
derstand. — Plato. 

Poets should be lawgivers ; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration 
should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead. — Emer- 
son. 

We call those poets who are first to mark 
Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, 
Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark 
While others only note that day is gone. 

Holmes. 
brave poets, keep back nothing*, 
Nor mix falsehood with the whole. 
Look up Godward ! Speak the truth in 
Worthy song* from earnest soul ! 
Hold, in high poetic duty 
Truest Truth, the fairest beauty. 

Mrs. Browning. 
The spirit of the Poets came at morn 

To Sinai, summoned by the Lord's command, 
Singers and Seers ; those born and those unborn 
The chosen souls of men, a solemn band. 

The noble army ranged, in viewless might 

Around that mountain peak which pierces heaven ; 

Greater and lesser teachers, sons of light, 

Their number was ten thousand score and seven. 

Then Allah took a covenant with his own, 
Saying*, ' ' My wisdom and my word receive. 

Speak of me unto men, known or unknown, 
Heard or unheard : bid such as will believe.' ' 

6 ' Bear witness then," spake Allah, " souls most dear, 
I am your Lord, and ye heralds of mine." 
Thenceforward through all lands his Poets bear 
The message of the mystery divine. 

Edwin Arnold. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION IN WESTERN 

LITERATURE. 

The poets are the seers of the race. Their best 
work comes from the intuitional heights where they 
dwell, conveying truths beyond reason, not understood 
even by themselves, but merely transmitted through 
them. They are the few tall pines towering above the 
common forest to an extraordinary exaltation, where 
they catch the earliest and latest sunbeams which pro- 
long their day far beyond the limits below, and pene- 
trating into the rare upper currents whose whisperings 
seldom descend to the crowd. 

However diverse the forms of their expression, the 
heart of it is thoroughly harmonious. They are always 
prophets voicing a divine message received in the 
mount, and in these modern days they are almost the 
only prophets we have. Therefore it is not a mere 
pleasantry to collect their testimony upon an unusual 
theme. When it is found that, though working inde- 
pendently, they are in deep accord upon reincarna- 
tion, the inevitable conclusion is that their common in- 
spiration means something — namely, that their gospel 
is w T orth receiving. 

It may be objected that these poems are merely 
dreamy effusions along the same line of lunacy, with 



128 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

no real attachment to the solid foundations upon which 
all wholesome poetry is based ; that they are kinks in 
the intellects of genius displaying the weakness of 
men otherwise strong. But so universal a feeling can- 
not be disposed of in that way, especially when it is 
found to contribute to the solution of life's mystery. 
All the poets believe in immortality, though unaided 
reason and observation cannot demonstrate it. Some 
inexperienced people deride the fact that nearly all 
poetry centres upon the theme of Love — the most il- 
logical and airy of sentiments. But the deepest sense 
of the world is nourished by the certainty of these 
" vague " truths. So the presence of reincarnation in 
the creed of the poets may give us courage to confide 
in our own impressions, for " all men are poets at 
heart." What they have dared publish we may ven- 
ture to believe and will find a source of strength. 

It is well known that the idea of reincarnation 
abounds in oriental poetry. But as our purpose is to 
demonstrate the prevalence of the same thought among 
our own poets, most of whom are wholly independent 
of eastern influence, we shall here confine our atten- 
tion to the spontaneous utterances of American and 
European poets. We shall find that the great major- 
ity of the highest occidental poets lean toward this 
thought, and many of them unhesitatingly avow it. 
For convenience we divide our study into four parts, 
comprising forty-two authors. 

Part I. American Poets, (thirteen.) 

II. British Poets, (seventeen.) 

III. Continental Poets, (six.) 

IV. Platonic Poets, (seven.) 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 129 



PART I. AMERICAN POETRY. 



PREEXISTENCE. 

BY PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE. 

While sauntering through the crowded street 

Some half-remembered face I meet, 

Albeit upon no mortal shore 

That face, methinks, hath smiled before. 

Lost in a gay and festal throng 

I tremble at some tender song 

Set to an air whose golden bars 

I must have heard in other stars. 

In sacred aisles I pause to share 

The blessing of a priestly prayer, 

When the whole scene which greets mine eyes 

In some strange mode I recognize, 

As one whose every mystic part 

I feel prefigured in my heart. 

At sunset as I calmly stand 

A stranger on an alien strand 

Familiar as my childhood's home 

Seems the long stretch of wave and foam. 

A ship sails toward me o'er the bay 

And what she comes to do and say 

I can foretell. A prescient lore 

Springs from some life outlived of yore. 

O swift, instructive, startling gleams 

Of deep soul-knowledge : not as dreams 

For aye ye vaguely dawn and die. 

But oft with lightning certainty 

Pierce through the dark oblivious brain 

To make old thoughts and memories plain : 



130 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Thoughts which perchance must travel back 
Across the wild bewildering track 
• Of countless aeons ; memories far 
High reaching as yon pallid star, 
Unknown, scarce seen, whose flickering grace 
Faints on the outmost rings of space. 



A MYSTERY. 

BY J. G. WHITTIER. 

The river hemmed with leaving trees 
Wound through the meadows green, 

A low blue line of mountain showed 
The open pines between. 

One sharp tall peak above them all 

Clear into sunlight sprang, 
I saw the river of my dreams, 

The mountain that I sang. 

No clue of memory led me on, 

But well the ways I knew, 
A feeling of familiar things 

With every footstep grew. 

Yet ne'er before that river's rim 
Was pressed by feet of mine, 

Never before mine eyes had crossed 
That broken mountain line. 

A presence strange at once and known 
Walked with me as my guide, 

The skirts of some forgotten life 
Trailed noiseless at my side. 



ARNATION, 131 



Was it a dim-remembered dream 
Or glimpse through aeons old ? 

The secret which the mountains kept 
The river never told. 



THE METEMPSYCHOSIS OF THE PINE. 

BY BAYARD TAYLOR. 

As when the haze of some wan moonlight makes 
Familiar fields a land of mystery, 
Where, chill and strange, a ghostly presence wakes 
In flower or bush or tree, 

Another life, the life of day o'erwhelms, 
The past from present consciousness takes hue 
As we remembe^ ~ T ast and cloudy realms 
Our feet have r Pandered through : 

So, oft, some moonlight of the mind makes dumb 
The stir of outer thought : wide open seems 
The gate where through strange sympathies have come 
The secret of our dreams : 

The source of fine impressions, shooting deep 
Below the falling plummet of the sense 
Which strike beyond all Time and backward sweep 
Through all intelligence. 

We touch the lower life of beast and clod 
And the long progress of the ages see 
From blind old Chaos, ere the breath of God 
Moved it to harmony. 

All outward vision yields to that within 
Whereof nor creed nor canon holds the key ; 



132 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

We only feel that we have ever been 
And evermore shall be. 



And thus I know, by memories unfurled 
In rarer moods, and many a nameless sign 
That once in Time and somewhere in the world 
I was a towering pine. 

Some blind harmonic instinct pierced the rind 
Of that slow life which made me straight and high, 
And I became a harp for every wind, 
A voice for every sky. 

And thus for centuries my rhythmic chant 
Rolled down the gorge or surged about the hill, 
Gentle or stern or sad or jubilant, 
At every season's will. 

No longer memory whispers whence arose 
The doom that tore me from my place of pride, 
Whether by storms that load the peak with snows, 
Or hands of men I died. 

Yet still that life awakens, brings agaki 
Its airy anthems, resonant and long, 
Till earth and sky transfigured fill my brain 
With rhythmic sweeps of song. 

Thence am I made a poet ; thence are sprung 
Those shadowy motions of the soul that reach 
Beyond all grasp of art, — for which the soul 
Is ignorant of speech. 

And if some wild full-gathered harmony 
Eolls its unbroken music through my line, 
There lives and murmurs, faintly though it be, 
The spirit of the pine. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 133 
THE POET IN THE EAST. 

BY BAYARD TAYLOR. 

The poet came to the land of the East 

When spring was in the air, 
The East was dressed for a wedding feast 

So young she seemed and fair, 
And the poet knew the land of the East 

His soul was native there. 

All things to him were the visible forms 

Of early and precious dreams, 
Familiar visions that mocked his quest 

Beside the western streams, 
Or gleamed in the gold of the clouds unrolled 

In the sunset's dying beams. 

INTIMATIONS OF PREVIOUS EXISTENCE. 

BY L. E. LANDON. 

Methinks we must have known some former state 
More glorious than our present, and the heart 
Is haunted with dim memories, shadows left 
By past magnificence ; and hence we pine 
With vain aspirings, hopes that fill the eyes 
With bitter tears for their own vanity. 
Remembrance makes the poet : 't is the past 
Lingering within him, with a keener sense 
Than is upon the thoughts of common men, 
Of what has been, that fills the actual world 
With unreal likenesses of lovely shapes 
That were and are not ; and the fairer they, 
The more their contrast with existing things, 
The more his power, the greater is his grief. 
We are then fallen from some nobler state 
Whose consciousness is as an unknown curse, 
And we feel capable of happiness 
Only to know it is not of our sphere. 



134 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 
THE METEMPSYCHOSIS. 

BY T. B. ALDRICH. 

I know my own creation was divine. 

Strewn on the breezy continents I see 

The veine'd shells and burnished scales which once 

Enclosed my being, — husks that had their use ; 

I brood on all the shapes I must attain 

Before I reach the Perfect, which is God, 

And dream my dream, and let the rabble go ; 

For I am of the mountains and the sea, 

The deserts, and the caverns in the earth, 

The catacombs and fragments of old worlds. 

I was a spirit on the mountain-tops, 
A perfume in the valleys, a simoom 
On arid deserts, a nomadic wind 
Roaming the universe, a tireless Voice. 
I was ere Romulus and Remus were ; 
I was ere Nineveh and Babylon ; 
I was, and am, and evermore shall be, 
Progressing, never reaching to the end. 

A hundred years I trembled in the grass, 
The delicate trefoil that muffled warm 
A slope on Ida ; for a hundred years 
Moved in the purple gyre of those dark flowers 
The Grecian women strew upon the dead. 
Under the earth, in fragrant glooms, I dwelt ; 
Then in the veins and sinews of a pine 
On a lone isle, where, from the Cyclades, 
A mighty wind, like a leviathan, 
Ploughed through the brine, and from those solitudes 
Sent Silence, frightened. To and fro I swayed, 
Drawing the sunshine from the stooping clouds. 
Suns came and went, and many a mystic moon, 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 135 

Orbing and waning, and fierce meteors, 
Leaving their lurid ghosts to haunt the night. 
I heard loud voices by the sounding shore, 
The stormy sea-gods, and from fluted conchs 
Wild music, and strange shadows floated by, 
Some moaning and some singing. So the years 
Clustered about me, till the hand of God 
Let down the lightning from a sultry sky, 
Splintered the pine and split the iron rock ; 
And from my odorous prison-house a bird, 
I in its bosom, darted : so we flew, 
Turning the brittle edge of one high wave, 
Island and tree and sea-gods left behind ! 

Free as the air from zone to zone I flew, 
Far from the tumult to the quiet gates 
Of daybreak ; and beneath me I beheld 
Vineyards, and rivers that like silver threads 
Ran through the green and gold of pasture-lands, 
And here and there a hamlet, a white rose, 
And here and there a city, whose slim spires 
And palace-roofs and swollen domes uprose 
Like scintillant stalagmites in the sun ; 
I saw huge navies battling with a storm 
By ragged reefs along the desolate coasts, — 
And lazy merchantmen, that crawled, like flies, 
Over the blue enamel of the sea 
To India or the icy Labradors. 

A century was as a single day. 
What is a day to an immortal soul ? 
A breath, no more. And yet I hold one hour 
Beyond all price, — that hour when from the sky 
I circled near and nearer to the earth, 
Nearer and nearer, till I brushed my wings 
Against the pointed chestnuts, where a stream, 
That foamed and chattered over pebbly shoals, 
Fled through the briony, and with a shout 



136 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Leapt headlong down a precipice ; and there, 

Gathering wild-flowers in the cool ravine, 

Wandered a woman more divinely shaped 

Than any of the creatures of the air, 

Or river-goddesses, or restless shades 

Of noble matrons marvellous in their time 

For beauty and great suffering ; and I sung, 

I charmed her thought, I gave her dreams, and then 

Down from the dewy atmosphere I stole 

And nestled in her bosom. There I slept 

From moon to moon, while in her eyes a thought 

Grew sweet and sweeter, deepening like the dawn — 

A mystical forewarning ! When the stream, 

Breaking through leafless brambles and dead leaves, 

Piped shriller treble, and from chestnut-boughs 

The fruit dropt noiseless through the autumn night, 

I gave a quick, low cry, as infants do : 

We weep when we are born, not when we die ! 

So was it destined ; and thus came I here, 

To walk the earth and wear the form of Man, 

To suffer bravely as becomes my state, 

One step, one grade, one cycle nearer God. 



IDENTITY. 

BY T. B. ALDRICH. 

Somewhere — in desolate wind-swept space — 
In twilight-land, — in no-man's land, 

Two hurrying shapes met face to face 
And bade each other stand. 



" And who are you? " cried one agape, 
Shuddering in the gloaming light. 

" I know not," said the other shape, 
" I only died last night." 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 137 
ONE THOUSAND YEAKS AGO. 

BY CHARLES G. LELAtfD. 

Thou and I in spirit land 

One thousand years ago, 
Watched the waves beat on the strand, 

Ceaseless ebb and flow, 
Vowed to love and ever love, 

One thousand years ago. 

Thou and I in greenwood shade 

Nine hundred years ago 
Heard the wild dove in the glade 

Murmuring soft and low, 
Vowed to love for evermore 

Nine hundred years ago. 

Thou and I in yonder star 

Eight hundred years ago 
Saw strange forms of light afar 

In wildest beauty glow. 
All things change, but love endures 

Now as long ago. 

Thou and I in Norman halls 

Seven hundred years ago 
Heard the warden on the walls 

Loud his trumpets blow, 
" Ton amors sera tojors," 

Seven hundred years ago. 

Thou and I in Germany, 

Six hundred years ago. 
Then I bound the red cross on, 

" True love, I must go, 



138 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

But we part to meet again 
In the endless flow." 

Thou and I in Syrian plains 

Five hundred years ago 
Felt the wild fire in our veins 

To a fever glow. 
All things die, but love lives on 

Now as long ago. 

Thou and I in shadow land 

Four hundred years ago 
Saw strange flowers bloom on the strand, 

Heard strange breezes blow. 
In the ideal, love is real, 

This alone I know. 

Thou and I in Italy 

Three hundred years ago 
Lived in faith and died for God, 

Felt the fagots glow, 
Ever new and ever true, 

Three hundred years ago. 

Thou and I on Southern seas 

Two hundred years ago 
Felt the perfumed even-breeze, 
Spoke in Spanish by the trees, 

Had no care or woe. 
Life went dreamily in song, 

Two hundred years ago. 

Thou and I 'mid Northern snows 

One hundred years ago 
Led an iron silent life 

And were glad to flow 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 139 

Onward into changing death, 
One hundred years ago. 

Thou and I but yesterday 

Met in fashion's show. 
Love, did you remember me, 

Love of long ago ? 
Yes : we kept the fond oath sworn 

One thousand years ago. 



THE FINAL THOUGHT. 

BY MAURICE THOMPSON. 

What is the grandest thought 
Toward which the soul has wrought ? 
Has it the spirit form, 
And the power of a storm ? 
Comes it of prophecy 
(That borrows light of uncreated fires) 
Or of transmitted strains of memory 
Sent down through countless sires ? 



Which way are my feet set ? 
Through infinite changes yet 
Shall I go on, 
Nearer and nearer drawn 
To thee, 
God of eternity ? 
How shall the Human grow, 
By changes fine and slow, 
To thy perfection from the life-dawn sought ? 
What is the highest thought ? 

Ah ! these dim memories, 
Of when thy voice spake lovingly to me, 
Under the Eden trees, 



140 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Saying, " Lord of all creation thou shalt be," — 
How they haunt me and elude — 
How they hover, how they brood 

On the horizon, fading yet dying not ! 
What is the final thought ? 

What if I once did dwell 

In the lowest dust germ-cell, 
A faint fore-hint of life called forth of God, 

Waxing and struggling on, 
Through the long flickering dawn, 

The awful while His feet earth's bosom trod ? 
What if He shaped me so, 
And caused my life to blow 
Into the full soul-flower in Eden- air ? 

Lo ! now I am not good, 

And I stand in solitude, 
Calling to Him (and yet He answers not) : 

What is the final thought ? 

What myriads of years up from the germ ! 
What countless ages back from man to worm ! 
And yet from man to God, — oh, help me now ! 
A cold despair is beading on my brow ! 
I may see Him, and seeing know Him not ! 
What is the highest thought ? 



So comes, at last, 

The answer from the Vast. ... 
Not so, there is a rush of wings — 
Earth feels the presence of invisible things, 

Closer and closer drawn 

In rosy mists of dawn ! 
One dies to conquer Death 

And to burst the awful tomb — 
Lo, with his dying breath 

He blows love into bloom ! 



IE INC A RNA TION. 141 

Love ! Faith is born of it ! 

Death is the scorn of it ! 
It fills the earth and thrills the heavens above : 

And God is love, 
And life is love, and, though we heed it not, 

Love is the final thought. 

FROM "A POEM READ AT BROWN UNIVERSITY." 

BY N. P. WILLIS. 

But what a mystery this erring mind ? 
It wakes within a frame of various powers 
A stranger in a new and wondrous world. 
It brings an instinct from some other sphere, 
For its fine senses are familiar all, 
And with the unconscious habit of a dream 
It calls and they obey. The priceless sight 
Springs to its curious organ, and the ear 
Learns strangely to detect the articulate air 
In its unseen divisions, and the tongue 
Gets its miraculous lesson with the rest, 
And in the midst of an obedient throng 
Of well trained ministers, the mind goes forth 
To search the secrets of its new found home. 

FROM "BEYOND." 

BY J. T. TROWBRIDGE. 

From her own fair dominions 
Long since, with shorn pinions 
My spirit was banished. 
But above her still hover in vigils and dreams 
Ethereal visitants, voices and gleams 
That forever remind her 
Of something behind her 
Long vanished. 



142 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Through the listening night 
With mysterious flight 

Pass winged intimations ; 
Like stars shot from heaven, their still voices call to me 
Far and departing they signal and call to me, 
Strangely beseeching me, 
Chiding yet teaching me 
Patience. 



FROM " RAIN IN SUMMER." 

BY H. W. LONGFELLOW. 

Thus the seer, with vision clear, 

Sees forms appear and disappear 

In the perpetual round of strange 

Mysterious change 

From birth to death, from death to birth, 

From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, 

Till glimpses more sublime 

Of things unseen before 

Unto his wondering eyes reveal 

The universe, as an immeasurable wheel 

Turning for evermore 

In the rapid rushing river of time. 



FROM "THE TWILIGHT." 

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

Sometimes a breath floats by me, 
And odor from Dreamland sent, 

Which makes the ghost seem nigh me 
Of a something that came and went, 

Of a life lived somewhere, I know not 
In what diviner sphere : 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 143 

Of mem'ries that come not and go not ; 

Like music once heard by an ear 
That cannot forget or reclaim it ; 
A something so shy, it would shame it 

To make it a show. 
A something too vague, could I name it, 

For others to know : 
As though I had lived it and dreamed it, 
As though I had acted and schemed it 

Long ago. 

And yet, could I live it over, 

This Life which stirs in my brain ; 
Could I be both maiden and lover, 
Moon and tide, bee and clover, 

As I seem to have been, once again,— 
Could I but speak and show it, 

This pleasure more sharp than pain, 
Which baffles and lures me so, — 
The world would not lack a poet, 
Such as it had 
In the ages glad, 
Long ago. 



FROM "FACING WEST FROM CALIFORNIA'S 
SHORES." 

BY WALT WHITMAN. 

Facing west from California's shores, 
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, 
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of ma- 
ternity, the land of migrations, look afar, 
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost 

circled : 
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of 
Kashmere, 



144 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and 

the hero, 
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice 

islands, 
Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wan- 

der'd, 
Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous. 
(But where is what I started for so long ago ? 
And why is it yet unfound ?) 



FROM " LEAVES OF GRASS." 

BY WALT WHITMAN. 

I know T am deathless. 

I know that this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a car- 
penter's compass ; 

And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thou- 
sand or ten million years, 

I can cheerfully take it now or with equal cheerfulness I 
can wait. 

As to you, Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many 

deaths. 
No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. 

Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five 
thousand years. 

Births have brought us richness and variety, and other 
births have brought us richness and variety. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 145 
STANZAS. 

BY THOMAS W. PARSONS. 

" We are such stuff as dreams are made ofP 

We have forgot what we have been, 
And what we are we little know ; 
We fancy new events begin, 
But all has happened long ago. 

Through many a verse life's poem flows, 
But still, though seldom marked by men, 
At times returns the constant close, 
Still the old chorus comes again. 

The childish grief — the boyish fear — 
The hope in manhood's breast that burns ; 
The doubt — the transport, and the tear — 
Each mood, each impulse, oft returns. 

Before mine infant eyes had hailed 
The new-born glory of the day, 
When the first wondrous morn unveiled 
The breathing world that round me lay ; 

The same strange darkness o'er my brain 
Folded its close mysterious wings, 
The ignorance of joy or pain, 
That each recurring midnight brings. 

Full oft my feelings make me start, 
Like footprints on a desert shore, 
As if the chambers of my heart 
Had heard their shadowy step before. 

So looking into thy fond eyes, 
Strange memories come to me, as though 
Somewhere — perchance in Paradise — 
I had adored thee long ago, 



146 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 



PART II. BRITISH POETRY. 



FROM " INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY." 

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ; 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar. 
Not in entire forgetfulness 
And not in utter nakedness 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God who is our home. 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy ; 
Shades of the prison house begin to close 

Upon the growing boy ; 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows 

He sees it in his joy. 
The youth who daily farther from the East 
Must travel, still is nature's priest, 
And by the vision splendid 
Is on his way attended. 
At length the man perceives it die away 
And fade into the light of common day. 

Edmund W. Gosse treats the idea of Wordsworth's 
" Intimations " in a way directly opposite to the older 
poet, acknowledging the previous life, but rejoicing in 
the speedy forgetting of it, in these verses : — 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 147 
TO MY DAUGHTER. 

BY EDMUND W. GOSSE. 

Thou hast the colors of the Spring, 
The gold of king cups triumphing, 

The blue of wood-bells wild ; 
But winter thoughts thy spirit fill, 
And thou art wandering from us still, 

Too young to be our child. 

Yet have thy fleeting smiles confessed, 
Thou dear and much desired guest, 

That home is near at hand. 
Long lost in high mysterious lands, 
Close by our door thy spirit stands, 

In journey wellnigh past. 

Oh, sweet bewildered soul, I watch 
The fountains of thine eyes, to catch 

New fancies bubbling there ; 
To feel one common light, and lose 
The flood of strange ethereal hues 

Too dire for us to share ! 

Fade, cold immortal lights, and make 
This creature human for my sake, 

Since I am nought but clay ; 
An angel is too fine a thing 
To sit behind my chair and sing 

And cheer my passing day. 

I smile, who could not smile, unless 
The air of rapt unconsciousness 

Passed with the fading hours ; 
I joy in every childish sign 
That proves the stranger less divine 

And much more meekly ours. 



148 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 



A REMEMBRANCE. 

BY DEAN ALFORD. 

Methixks I can remember when a shade 

All soft and flowery was my couch, and I 

A little naked child, with fair white flesh 

And wings all gold bedropt, and o'er my head * 

Bright fruits were hanging and tall balmy shrines 

Shed odorous gums around me, and I lay 

Sleeping and waking in that wondrous air 

Which seemed infused with glory, and each breeze 

Bore as it wandered by, sweet melodies ; 

But whence, I knew not. One delight was there, 

Whether of feeling or of sight or touch 

I know not now — which is not in this earth, 

Something all-glorious and all-beautiful, 

Of which our language speaketh not, and which 

Flies from the eager grasping of my thought 

As doth the shade of a forgotten dream. 

All knowledge had I, but I cared not then 

To search into my soul and draw it thence. 

The blessed creatures that around me played 

I knew them all, and where their resting was, 

And all their hidden symmetry I knew, 

And how the form is linked into the soul, — 

I knew it all, but thought not on it then, 

I was so happy. 

And once upon a time 
I saw an army of bright beaming shapes 
Fair-faced and rosy-cinctured and gold- winged 
Approach upon the air. They came to me 
And from a crystal chalice silver brimmed 
Put sparkling potion to my lips and stood 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 149 

All around me, in the many blooming shades, 
Shedding into the centre where I lay 
A mingling of soft light ; and then they sang 
Songs of the land they dwelt in ; and the last 
Lingereth even till now upon mine ear : 

Holy and blest 

Be the calm of thy rest, 

For thy chamber of sleep 

Shall be dark and deep ; 

They shall dig thee a tomb 

In the dark deep womb, 

In the warm dark womb. 
Spread ye, spread the dewy mist around him, 
Spread ye, spread till the thick dark night surround him, 
Till the dark long night has bound him 
Which bindeth all before their birth 
Down upon the nether earth. 
The first cloud is beaming and bright, 
The next cloud is mellowed in light, 
The third cloud is dim to sight, 
And it stretches away into gloomy night. 
Twine ye, twine the mystic threads around him, 
Twine ye, twine, till the fast firm fate surround him, 
Till the firm cold fate hath bound him 
Which bindeth all before their birth 
Down upon the nether earth. 
The first thread is beaming and bright, 
The next thread is mellowed in light, 
The third thread is dim to sight, 
And it stretches away into gloomy night. 
Sing ye, sing the fairy songs around him, 
Sing ye, sing, till the dull warm sleep surround him, 
Till the warm damp sleep hath bound him 
Which bindeth all before their birth 
Down upon the nether earth. 



150 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

The first dream is beaming and bright, 
The next dream is mellowed in light, 
The third dream is dim to sight, 
And it stretches away into gloomy night. 

Then dimness passed upon me, and that song 
Was sounding o'er me when I woke 
To be a pilgrim on the nether earth. 



RETURNING DREAMS. 

BY R. M. MILNES (LORD HOUGHTON). 

As in that world of Dream whose mystic shades 
Are cast by still more mystic substances, 
We ofttimes have an unreflecting sense, 
A silent consciousness of some things past, 
So clear that we can wholly comprehend 
Others of which they are a part, and even 
Continue them in action, though no stress 
Of after memory can recognize 
That we have had experience of those things 
Or sleeping or awake : 

Thus in the dream, 
Our universal Dream, of Mortal Life, 
The incidents of an anterior dream, 
Or it may be, Existence, noiselessly intrude 
Into the daily flow of earthly things, 
Instincts of good — immediate sympathies, 
Places come at by chance, that claim at once 
An old acquaintance — single random looks 
That bare a stranger's bosom to our eyes ; 
We know these things are so, we ask not why, 
But act and follow as the Dream goes on. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 151 

FROM "DE PROFUNDIS." 

BIRTH. 
BY ALFRED TENNYSON. 

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, 
Where all that was to be, in all that was, 
Whirled for a million aeons thro' the vast 
Waste dawn of multitudinous eddying light — 
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, 
Thro' all this changing world of changeless law, 
And every phase of ever heightening life, 
And nine long months of ante-natal gloom, 
Thou comest. 

Tennyson also writes in " The Two Voices " : — 

For how should I for certain hold 
Because my memory is so cold, 
That I first was in human mould? 

It may be that no life is found 
Which only to one engine bound 
Falls off, but cycles always round. 

But, if I lapsed from nobler place, 
Some legend of a fallen race 
Alone might hint of my disgrace. 

Or, if through lower lives I came — 
Tho' all experience past became 
Consolidate in mind and frame — 

I might forget my weaker lot ; 
For is not our first year forgot ? 
The haunts of memory echo not. 



152 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Some draughts of Lethe doth await, 

As old mythologies relate, 

The slipping through from state to state. 

Moreover, something is or seems, 
That touches me with mystic gleams, 
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams — 

Of something felt, like something here ; 
Of something done, I know not where ; 
Such as no language may declare. 



More interesting still, from Tennyson, is an early 
sonnet which has been omitted from the later editions 
of his collected poetry : — 

As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood 

And ebb into a former life, or seem 

To lapse far back in a confused dream 

To states of mystical similitude, 

If one but speaks or hems or stirs a chair 

Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, 

So that we say, all this hath been before, 

All this hath been, I know not when or where ; 

So, friend, when first I looked upon your face 

Our thoughts gave answer each to each, so true, 

Opposed mirrors each reflecting each — 

Although I knew not in what time or place, 

Methought that I had often met with you, 

And each had lived in other's mind and speech. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 153 



SUDDEN LIGHT. 

BY D. G. ROSSETTI. 

I have been here before, 

But when or how I cannot tell ; 
I know the grass beyond the door. 

The sweet keen smell, 
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. 

You have been mine before, — 

How long ago I may not know : 
But just when at that swallow's soar 

Your neck turned so, 
Some veil did fall, — I knew it all of yore. 

Then, now, perchance again ! 

O round mine eyes your tresses shake ! 
Shall we not lie as we have lain 
Thus for Love's sake, 
And sleep, and wake, yet never break the chain ? 

FROM "CATO'S SOLILOQUY ON THE SOUL." 

BY JOSEPH ADDISON. 

Eternity — thou pleasing, dreadful thought, 
Through what variety of untried being, 
Through what new scenes and dangers must we pass ? 
The wide, th' unbounded prospect lies before me, 
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it. 

FROM " THE MYSTIC." 

BY PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 

Who dreams not life more yearful than the hours 
Since first into this world he wept his way 
Erreth much, may be. Called of God, man's soul 



154 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

In patriarchal periods, comet-like, 

Ranges, perchance, all spheres successive, and in each 

With nobler powers endowed and senses new 

Set season bideth. 



FROM "A RECORD." 

BY WILLIAM SHARP. 

None sees the slow and upward sweep 
By which the soul from life-depths deep 
Ascends, — unless, mayhap, when free, 
With each new death we backward see 
The long perspective of our race 
Our multitudinous past lives trace. 

The following occurs in Tapper's "Proverbial 
Philosophy " : — 

OF MEMORY. 

Be ye my judges, imaginative minds, full-fledged to soar 

into the sun, 
Whose grosser natural thoughts the chemistry of wisdom 

hath sublimed, 
Have ye not confessed to a feeling, a consciousness strange 

and vague, 
That ye have gone this way before, and walk again your 

daily life, 
Tracking an old routine, and on some foreign strand, 
Where bodily ye have never stood, finding your own foot- 
steps ? 
Hath not at times some recent friend looked out an old 

familiar, 
Some newest circumstance or place teemed as with ancient 

memories ? 
A startling sudden flash lighteth up all for an instant, 
And then it is quenched, as in darkness, and leaveth the 

cold spirit trembling. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 155 

Throughout Browning the truth of reincarnation 
finds frequent utterance, though not always so distinct- 
ly as in these three extracts. 

FROM " PARACELSUS." 

At times I almost dream 
I too have spent a life the sages' way, 
And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance 
I perished in an arrogant self-reliance 
An age ago ; and in that act, a prayer 
For one more chance went up so earnest, so 
Instinct with better light let in by Death, 
That life was blotted out — not so completely 
But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, 
Dim memories ; as now, when seems once more 
The goal in sight again. 

FROM "ONE WORD MORE." 

I shall never, in the years remaining, 
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues. 
This of verse alone one life allows me ; 
Other heights in other lives, God willing. 

FROM "CHRISTINA." 

There are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire- 
flames noondays kindle, 

Whereby piled-up honors perish, whereby swollen ambitions 
dwindle ; 

While just this or that poor impulse which for once had 
play unstifled, 

Seems the sole work of a lifetime that away the rest have 
trifled. 

FROM "EVELYN HOPE." 

Delayed it may be for more lives yet 

Through worlds I must traverse, not a few — 

Much is to learn and much to forget 
Ere the time be come for taking you. 



156 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Doubt you if, in some such moment, as she fixed me, she 

felt clearly, 
Ages past the soul existed, here an age 't is resting merely, 
And hence fleets again for ages ; while the true end, sole 

and single, 
It stops here for is, this lone way, with some other soul to 

mingle. . 



In Dr. Leyden's beautiful "Ode to Scottish Music " 
is this stanza : — 

Ah, sure, as Hindoo legends tell, 
When music's tones the bosom swell 

The scenes of former life return, 
Ere sunk beneath the morning star, 
We left our parent climes afar, 

Immured in mortal forms to mourn. 



Coleridge confesses his fondness for the same idea 
in the sonnet which he composed " On a homeward 
journey upon hearing of the birth of a son " : — 

Oft in my brain does that strange fancy roll 

Which makes the present (while the flash does last) 
Seem a mere semblance of some unknown past, 
Mixed with such feelings as perplex the soul 
Self-questioned in her sleep : and some have said 
We lived, ere yet this robe of flesh we wore. 

my sweet baby ! when I reach my door 
If heavy looks should tell me thou art dead 
(As sometimes through excess of hope I fear), 

1 think that I should struggle to believe 
Thou wert a spirit, to this nether sphere 

Sentenced for some more venial crime to grieve ; 
Didst scream, then spring to meet Heaven's quick reprieve. 
While we wept idly o'er thy little bier. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 157 

The following poem has a peculiar history. Though 
one of the most beautiful of the entire group, it is the 
work of a seventeen-year-old girl. In 1846 this 
child, Emma Tatham, attracted the attention of a 
London clergyman as a poetic genius, and she read to 
him, at his frequent visits, her phenomenal composi- 
tions, with playful frankness devoid of all affectation 
or consciousness of brilliancy. She was very delicate, 
but of ruddy countenance, and her bright winning 
simplicity carried no suggestion of a sickly prodigy. 
But she was an intimate friend of the best poets 
through their books, and her critical judgment of their 
works was surprisingly mature and keen. From the 
age of sixteen to that of seventeen and a half, she 
rapidly wrote an abundance of exquisite poems. Her 
extreme modesty would not permit their publication 
until 1854 — seven years later. Issued in the quietest 
way by a provincial publisher, they met with a singu- 
lar unanimity of applause, though the extreme youth 
of their author was unknown. Her rich religious expe- 
rience directed most of them into the vein of lofty piety, 
but the general press, and even "The Athenaeum," 
that severest censor of new writers, spoke commend- 
ingly of them. The first edition sold in a few weeks. 
An exceptionally brilliant career was predicted for 
the young poet, but in less than a year from the an- 
nouncement of her book, she died. 

" The Dream of Pythagoras," the initial poem of the 
volume, from which the collection is named, is given 
here entire (from the fifth edition, 1872), as it k fa- 
miliar to few Americans. 



158 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 
THE DREAM OF PYTHAGORAS. 

BY EMMA TATHAM. 

" The soul was not then imprisoned in a gross mortal body, as it is now : it was 
united to a luminous, heavenly, ethereal body, which served it as a vehicle to fly 
through the air, rise to the stars, and wander over all the regions of immensity." 

Pythagoras, in Travels 0/ Cyrus. 

Pythagoras, amidst Crotona's groves, 

One summer eve, sat ; whilst the sacred few 

And favour'd at his feet reclin'd, entranc'd, 

List'ning to his great teachings. O'er their heads 

A lofty oak spread out his hundred hands 

Umbrageous, and a thousand slant sunbeams 

Play'd o'er them ; but beneath all was obscure 

And solemn, save that, as the sun went down, 

One pale and tremulous sunbeam, stealing in 

Through the unconscious leaves her silent way, 

Fell on the forehead of Pythagoras 

Like spiritual radiance ; all else wrapt 

In gloom delicious ; while the murmuring wind, 

Oft moving through the forest as in dreams, 

Made melancholy music. Then the sage 

Thus spoke : " My children, listen ; let the soul 

Hear her mysterious origin, and trace 

Her backward path to heaven. 'Twas but a dream ; 

And yet from shadows may we learn the shape 

And substance of undying truth. Methought 

In vision I beheld the first beginning 

And after-changes of my soul. O joy ! 

She is of no mean origin, but sprang 

From loftier source than stars or sunbeams know. 

Yea, like a small and feeble rill that bursts 

From everlasting mountain's coronet, 

And, winding through a thousand labyrinths 

Of darkness, deserts, and drear solitudes, 

Yet never dies, but, gaining depth and power, 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 159 

Leaps forth at last with uncontrollable might 
Into immortal sunshine and the breast 
Of boundless ocean, — so is this my soul. 
I felt myself spring like a sunbeam out 
From the Eternal, and my first abode 
Was a pure particle of light, wherein, 
Shrined like a beam in crystal, I did ride 
Gloriously through the firmament on wings 
Of floating flowers, ethereal gems, and wreaths 
Of vernal rainbows. I did paint a rose 
With blush of day-dawn, and a lily-bell 
With mine own essence ; every morn I dipt 
My robe in the full sun, then all day long- 
Shook out its dew on earth, and was content 
To be unmark'd, unworshipp'd, and unknown, 
And only lov'd of heaven. Thus did my soul 
Live spotless like her Source. 'T was mine to illume 
The palaces of nature, and explore 
Her hidden cabinets, and, raptur'd, read 
Her joyous secrets. O return, thou life 
Of purity ! I flew from mountain-top 
To mountain, building rainbow-bridges up — 
From hill to hill, and over boundless seas : 
Ecstasy was such life, and on the verge 
Of ripe perfection. But, alas ! I saw 
And envied the bold lightning, who could blind 
And startle nations, and I long'd to be 
A conqueror and destroyer, like to him. 
Methought it was a glorious joy, indeed, 
To shut and open heaven as he did, 
And have the thunders for my retinue, 
And tear the clouds, and blacken palaces, 
And in a moment whiten sky, and sea, 
And earth : therefore I murmur'd at my lot, 
Beautiful as it was, and that one murmur 
Despoil' d me of my glory. I became 
A dark and tyrant cloud driven by the storm. 



160 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Too earthly to be bright, too hard of heart 

To drop in mercy on the thirsty land ; 

And so no creature lov'd me. I was felt 

A blot where'er I came. Fair Summer scorn'd 

And spurn'd me from her blueness, for, she said, 

I would not wear her golden fringe, and so 

She could not rank me in her sparkling train. 

Soft Spring refused me, for she could not paint 

Her rainbows on a nature cold as mine, 

Incapable of tears. Autumn despised 

One who could do no good. Dark Winter frown'd, 

And number'd me among his ruffian host 

Of racers. Then unceasingly I fled 

Despairing through the murky firmament, 

Like a lone wreck athwart a midnight sea, 

Chased by the howling spirits of the storm, 

And without rest. At last, one day I saw 

In my continual flight, a desert blank 

And broad beneath me, where no water was ; 

And there I mark'd a weary antelope, 

Dying for thirst, all stretched out on the sand, 

With her poor trembling lips in agony 

Press'd to a scorch'd-up spring ; then, then, at last 

My hard heart broke, and I could weep. At once 

My terrible race was stopp'd, and I did melt 

Into the desert's heart, and with my tears 

I quench'd the thirst of the poor antelope. 

So having pour'd myself into the dry 

And desolate waste, I sprang up a wild flower 

In solitary beauty. There I grew 

Alone and feverish, for the hot sun bum'd 

And parch'd my tender leaves, and not a sigh 

Came from the winds. I seem'd to breathe an air 

Of fire, and had resign'd myself to death, 

When lo ! a solitary dewdrop fell 

Into my burning bosom ; then, for joy, 

My spirit rush'd into my lovely guest, 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 161 

And I became a dewdrop. Then, once more, 

My life was joyous, for the kingly sun 

Carried me up into the firmament, 

And hung me in a rainbow, and my soul 

Was robed in seven bright colors, and became 

A jewel in the sky. So did I learn 

The first great lessons ; mark ye them, my sons. 

Obedience is nobility ; and meek 

Humility is glory ; self alone 

Is base ; and pride is pain ; patience is power ; 

Beneficence is bliss. And now first brought 

To know myself and feel my littleness, 

I was to learn what greatness is prepar'd 

For virtuous souls, what mighty war they wage, 

What vast impossibilities o'ercome, 

What kingdoms, and infinitude of love, 

And harmony, and never-ending joy, 

And converse, and communion with the great 

And glorious Mind unknown, — are given to high 

And godlike souls. 

" Therefore the winds arose, 
And shook me from the rainbow where I hung, 
Into the depths of ocean ; then I dived 
Down to the coral citadels, and roved 
Through crystal mazes, among pearls and gems, 
And lovely buried creatures, who had sunk 
To find the jewel of eternal life. 
Sweet babes I saw clasp'd in their mothers' arms ; 
Kings of the north, each with his oozy crown ; 
Pale maidens, with their golden streaming hair 
Floating in solemn beauty, calm and still, 
In the deep, silent, tideless wave ; I saw 
Young beauteous boys wash'd down from reeling masts 
By sudden storm ; and brothers sleeping soft, 
Lock'd in each other's arms ; and countless wealth, 
And curling weed, and treasur'd knots of hair, 
And mouldering masts, and giant hulls that sank 



162 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

With thunder sobbing ; and blue palaces 

Where moonbeams, hand in hand, did dance with me 

To the soft music of the surging shells, 

Where all else was at rest. Calm, calm, and hush'd, 

And stormless, were those hidden deeps, and clear 

And pure as crystal. There I wander'd long 

In speechless dreamings, and wellnigh forgot 

My corporal nature, for it seem'd 

Melting into the silent infinite 

Around me, and I peacefully began 

To feel the mighty universe commune 

And converse with me ; and my soul became 

One note in nature's harmony. So sweet 

And soothing was that dream-like ecstasy, 

I could have slept into a wave, and roll'd 

Away through the blue mysteries forever, 

Dreaming my soul to nothing ; I could well 

Have drown' d my spark of immortality 

In drunkenness of peace ; I knew not yet 

The warrior life of virtue, and the high 

And honourable strife and storm that cleanse 

And exercise her pinions. I was now 

To learn the rapture of the struggle made 

For immortality and truth ; therefore 

The ocean toss'd me to his mountain chains, 

Bidding me front the tempest ; fires of heaven 

Were dancing o'er his cataracts, and scared 

His sounding billows ; glorious thunders roll'd 

Beneath, above, around ; the strong winds fought, 

Lifting up pyramids of tortur'd waves, 

Then dashing them to foam. I saw great ships 

As feathers on the opening sepulchres 

And starting monuments, 

And the gaunt waves leap'd up like fountains fierce, 

And snatch' d down f right en'd clouds, then shouting — fell, 

And rose again. I, whirling on their tops, 

Dizzy flew over masts of staggering ships, 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 163 

Then plunged into black night. My soul grew mad 

Ravish'd with the intense magnificence 

Of the harmonious chaos, for I heard 

Music amidst the thunders, and I saw 

Measure in all the madness of the waves 

And whirlpools ; yea, I lifted up my voice 

In praise of the Eternal, for I felt 

Rock'd in His hand, as in a cradling couch ; 

Rejoicing in His strength ; yea, I found rest 

In the unbounded roar, and fearless sang 

Glad echo to the thunder, and flash'd back 

The bright look of the lightning, and did fly 

On the dark pinions of the hurricane spirit 

In rapturous repose ; till suddenly 

My soul expanded, and I sprang aloft 

Into the lightning flame, leaping for joy 

From cloud to cloud. Then, first I felt my wings 

Wave into immortality, and flew 

Across the ocean with a shouting host 

Of thunders at my heels, and lit up heaven, 

And earth and sea, with one quick lamp, and crown'd 

The mountains with a momentary gold, 

Then cover'd them with blackness. Then I glanced 

Upon the mighty city in her sleep, 

Pierced all her mysteries with one swift look, 

Then bade my thunders shout. The city trembled ; 

And charm' d with the sublime outcry, I paus'd 

And listen' d. Yet had I to rise and learn 

A loftier lesson. I was lifted high 

Into the heavens, and there became a star, 

And on my new-form'd orb two angels sat. 

The one thus spoke : ' spirit, young and pure ! 

Say, wilt thou be my shrine ? I am of old, 

The first of all things, and of all the greatest ; 

I am the Sovereign Majesty, to whom 

The universe is given, though for a while 

I war with rebels strong ; my name is Truth. 



164 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

I am the Spirit of wisdom, love, and power, 
And come to claim thee ; and if thou obey 
My guiding, I will give thee thy desire, 
Even eternal life.' He ceas'd, and then 
The second angel spoke. i Ask not, O soul ! 
My name ; I bid thee free thyself, and know 
Thou hast the fount of life in thy own breast, 
And need'st no guiding : be a child no longer ; 
Throw off thy fetters, and with me enjoy 
Thy native independence, and assert 
Thy innate majesty ; Truth binds not me, 
And yet I am immortal ; be thou, too, 
A god unto thyself.' 

" But I had learn'd 
My own deep insufficiency, and gazed 
Indignant on th* unholy angel's face, 
And pierced its false refulgence, knowing well 
Obedience only is true liberty 
For spirits f orm'd to obey ; so best they reign. 
Straight the base rebel fled, and, ruled by Truth, 
I roll'd unerring on my shining road 
Around a glorious centre ; free, though bound, 
Because love bound me, and my law became 
My life and nature ; and my lustrous orb 
Pure spirits visited : I wore a light 
That shone across infinitude, and serv'd 
To guide returning wanderers. I sang 
With all my starry sisters, and we danced 
Around the throne of Time, and wash'd the base 
Of high Eternity like golden sands. 
There first my soul drank music, and was taught 
That melody is part of heaven, and lives 
In every heaven-born spirit like her breath ; 
There did I learn, that music without end 
Breathes, murmurs, swells, echoes, and floats, and peals, 
And thunders through creation, and in truth 
Is the celestial language, and the voice 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 165 

Of love ; and now my soul began to speak 
The speech of immortality. But yet 
I was to learn a lesson more severe — 
To shine alone in darkness, and the deeps 
Of sordid earth. So did I fall from heaven 
Far into night, beneath the mountains' roots, 
There, as a diamond burning amidst things 
Too base for utterance. Then, alas ! I felt 
The stirrings of impatience, pining sore 
For freedom, and communion with the fires 
And majesties of heaven, with whom ere while 
I walk'd, their equal. I had not yet learn'd 
That our appointed place is loftiest, 
However lowly. I was made to feel 
The dignity of suffering. O, my sons ! 
Sorrow and joy are but the spirit's life ; 
. Without these she is scarcely animate ; 
Anguish and bliss ennoble : either proves 
The greatness of its subject, and expands 
Her nature into power ; her every pulse 
Beats into new-born force, urging her on 
To conquering energy. — Then was I cast 
Into hot fires and flaming furnaces, 
Deep in the hollow globe ; there did I burn 
Deathless in agony, without murmur, 
Longing to die, until my patient soul 
Fainted into perfection : at that hour, 
Being victorious, I was snatch'd away 
To yet another lesson. I became 
A date-tree in the desert, to pour out 
My life in dumb benevolence, and full 
Obedience to each wind of heaven that blew. 
The traveller came — I gave him all my shade, 
Asking for no reward ; the lost bird flew 
For shelter to my branches, and I hid 
Her nest among my leaves ; the sunbeams ask'd 
To rest their hot and weary feet awhile 



166 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

On me, and I spread out my every arm 

T' embrace them, fanning them with all my plumes. 

Beneath my shade the dying pilgrim fell 

Praying for water ; I cool dewdrops caught 

And shook them on his lip ; I gave my fruit 

To strengthen the faint stranger, and I sang 

Soft echoes to the winds, living in nought 

For self ; but in all things for others' good. 

The storm arose, and patiently I bore 

And yielded to his tyranny ; I bow'd 

My tenderest foliage to his angry blast, 

And suffer'd him to tear it without sigh, 

And scatter on the waste my all of wealth. 

The billowing sands o'erwhelm'd me, yet I stood 

Silent beneath them ; so they roll'd away, 

And rending up my roots, left me a wreck 

Upon the wilderness. 

" 'T was thus, my sons, 
I dream'd my spirit wander'd, till at length, 
As desolate I mourn'd my helpless woe, 
My guardian angel took me to his heart, 
And thus he said : ' Spirit, well tried and true ! 
Conqueror I have made thee, and prepar'd 
For human life ; behold ! I wave the palm 
Of immortality before thine eyes : 
'T is thine ; it shall be thine, if thou aright 
Acquit thee of the part which yet remains, 
And teach what thou hast learn'd.' 

" This said, he simTd, 
And gently laid me in my mother's arms. 
Thus far the vision brought me — then it fled, 
And all was silence. Ah ! 't was but a dream ; 
This soul in vain struggles for purity ; 
This self-tormenting essence may exist 
For ever ; but what joy can being give 
Without perfection ! vainly do I seek 
That bliss for which I languish. Surely yet 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 167 

The Day-spring of our nature is to come ; 
Mournful we wait that dawning ; until then 
We grovel in the dust — in midnight grope, 
For ever seeking, never satisfied." 

Thus spake the solemn seer, then pausing, sigh'd, 
For all was darkness. 

A DROP OF DEW. 

BY ANDREW MARVELL. 

See how the orient dew, 
Shed from the bosom of the morn 
Into the blowing roses, 
Yet careless of its mansion new 
For the clear region where 'twas born, 

Round in itself encloses 
And in its little globe's extent 
Frames, as it can its native element. 
How it the splendid flower does slight, 
Scarcely touching where it lies 
But gazing back upon the skies, 
Shines with a mournful light, 
Like its own tear, 
Because so long divided from its sphere. 
Restless it rolls and insecure, 
Trembling lest it grow impure, 
Till the warm sun pities its pain 
And to the skies exhales it back again. 
So the soul, that drop, that ray 
Of the clear fountain of eternal day, 
Could it within the human flower be seen, 

Lamenting still its former height, 
Shuns the sweet flowers and the radiant green, 

And recollecting its own light 
Does in its pure and circling thoughts express 
The greater heaven in the heaven less. 



168 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Dr. Donne, in a long poem called " The Progress 
of the Soul," traces the Pythagorean course of an 
immortal being through an apple (by which Eve was 
tempted), a plant, a sparrow, a fish, a mouse (which 
climbed an elephant's proboscis to the brain, 

" the soul's bedchamber, 
And gnawed the life-cords there like a whole town 
Till, undermined, the slain beast tumbled down ; 
With him the murderer dies, whom envy sent to kill.") 

Then the soul enters a wolf, an ape, and at last a 
woman — Themech, the sister and wife of Cain. 

Mortimer Collins's poem, " The Inn of Strange 
Meetings," is an interesting expression of reincarna- 
tion, but it is too long to reprint here. Similar 
glimpses of this thought occur in Byron, Pope, 
Southey, Swinburne, and others, but it is difficult to 
select from them a distinct and continuous wording 
of it. 

PART III. CONTINENTAL POETRY. 



Ever since the time of Virgil, whose sixth iEneid 
(verses 724-) contains a sublime version of reincar- 
nation, and of Ovid, whose Metamorphoses beauti- 
fully present the old Greek mythologies of metemp- 
sychosis, this theme has attracted many European 
poets beside those of England. While the Latin poets 
obtained their inspiration from the East, through 
Pythagoras and Plato, the Northern singers seem to 
express it independently, unless it came to them with 
the Teutonic migration from the Aryan cradle of the 
race, and shifted its form with all their people's wan-' 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 169 

derings so that it has lost all traces of connection with 
its Indian source. The old Norse legends teem with 
many guises of soul-journeying. In sublime and lovely 
stories, ballads, and epics, these vikings and their 
kindred perpetuated their belief that the human in- 
dividuality travels through a great series of embodi- 
ments, which physically reveal the spiritual character. 
The Icelandic Sagas also delight in these fables of 
transmigration, and still fire the heart of Scandinavia 
and Denmark. It permeated the Welsh triads, and 
among the early Saxons this thought animated their 
Druid ceremonies and their noblest literature. The 
scriptures of those magnificent races whom Tacitus 
found in the German forests, whose intrepid manliness 
conquered the mistress of the world, and from whom 
are descended the modern ruling race, were inspired 
with this same doctrine. The treasures of these ancient 
writings are buried away from our sight, but a sug- 
gestion of their grandeur is found in the heroic quali- 
ties of the nations who were bred upon them. A 
beautiful German version of Giordano Bruno's Pytha- 
gorean Latin verses on the relation of the soul to the 
body is contained in Professor Carriere's Weltan- 
schauung (p. 452). Calderon, the Spanish poet, 
touches fondly on this idea in his drama " Life is a 
Dream." Bjornsen has written a superb Danish poem 
on transmigration called " Salme," but it has never 
been translated. The following selections are rep- 
resentative of the chief branches of Continental Eu- 
ropeans. Boyesen, although an American citizen, is 
really a modernized Norwegian. Goethe stands for 
the Teutonic race, and Schiller keeps him good com- 
pany. Victor Hugo and Beranger speak for France, 
and Campanella represents Italy. 



170 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 



TKA1STSMIGRATION. 

BY HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN. 

My spirit wrestles in anguish 

With fancies that will not depart ; 

A ghost who borrowed my semblance 
Has hid in the depth of my heart. 

A dim, resistless possession 

Impels me forever to do 
The phantom deeds of this phantom 

That lived ages ago. 

The thoughts that I think seem hoary 
And laden with dust and gloom ; 

My voice sounds strange, as if echoed 
From centuries long in the tomb. 

Methinks that e'en through my laughter 
Oft trembles a strain of dread ; 

A shivering ghost of laughter 

That is loth to rise from the dead. 

My tear has its fount in dead ages, 

And choked with their dust is my sigh ; 

I weep for the pale, dead sorrows 
Of the wraith that once was I. 

Ah, Earth ! thou art old and weary, 
With weight of centuries bent ; 

Thy pristine creative gladness 
In youthful aeons was spent. 

Perchance, in the distant ages, 
My soul, from Nirvana's frost, 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 171 

Will gather its scattered life -germs 
And quicken the life I lost. 

And then, like a song forgotten 

That haunts, yet eludes the ear, 
Or cry that chills the darkness 

With a vague, swift breath of fear, 

A faint remembrance shall visit 

That sun of earth and sky 
In whom the flame shall rekindle 

Of the soul which once was I. 

From Victor Hugo's poem, " A celle qui est 
voitee." 

"TO THE INVISIBLE ONE." 

I am the drift of a thousand tides, 

The captive of destiny ; 
The weight of all darkness upon me abides, 

But it cannot bury me. 

My spirit endures like a rocky isle 

Amid the ocean of fate, 
The thunderstorm is my domicile, 

The hurricane is my mate. 

I am the fugitive who far 

From home has taken flight ; 
Along with the owl and evening star 

I moan the song of night. 

Art thou not, too, like unto me 

A torch to light earth's gloom, 
A soul, therefore a mystery, 

A wanderer bound to roam ? 



172 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Seek for me in the sea bird's home, 

Descend to my release ! 
My depths of cavernous shadows dumb 

Illume, angel of peace ! 

As night brings forth the rosy morn, 

Perhaps 'tis heaven's law 
That from thy mystic smile is born 

A glory I ne'er saw. 

In this dark world where now I stay 

I scarce can see myself ; 
Thy radiant soul shines on my way 

As my fair guiding elf. 

With loving tones and beckoning hand 
Thou say'st, " Beyond the night 

I catch a glimpse upon the strand 
Of thy mansion gleaming bright." 

Before I came upon this earth 

I know I lived in gladness 
For ages as an angel. Birth 

Has caused my present sadness. 

My soul was once a heavenly dove. 

Do thou, in heaven's domains, 
Let fall a pinion from above 

Upon this bird's remains ! 

Yes, 'tis my dire misfortune now 

To hang between two ties, 
To hold within my furrowed brow 

The earth's clay, and the skies. 

Alas the pain of being man, 
Of dreaming o'er my fall, 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 173 

Of finding heaven within my span, 
Yet being but a pall ; 

Of toiling like a galley slave, 

Of carrying the load 
Of human burdens, while I rave 

To fly unto my God ; 

Of trailing garments black with rust, 

I, son of heaven above ! 
Of being only graveyard dust, 

E'en though my name is — Love* 



THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 
(la metempsycose.) 

by beranger. 

In philosophic mood, last night, as idly I was lying, 

That souls may transmigrate, methought there could be no 

denying : 
So, just to know to what I owe propensities so strong, 
I drew my soul into a chat — our gossip lasted long. 
u A votive offering," she observed, " well might I claim 

from thee ; 
For thou in being hadst remained a cipher, but for me : 
Yet not a virgin soul was I when first in thee enshrined." — 
Ah ! I suspected, little soul, thus much that I should find ! 

" Yes," she continued, " yes, of old — I recollect it now — 
In humble ivy was I wreathed round many a joyous brow. 
More subtle next the essence was that I essayed to warm, 
A bird's, that could salute the skies, a little bird's my form : 
Where thickets made a pleasant shade, where shepherdesses 

strolled, 
I fluttered round, hopped on the ground, my simple lays I 

trolled ; 



174 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

My pinions grew whilst still I flew in freedom on the 

wind." — 
Ah ! I suspected, little soul, thus much that I should find ! 

" Medor, my name, I next became a dog of wondrous tact, 
The guardian of a poor blind man, his sole support in fact ; 
The trick of holding in my mouth a wooden bowl I knew — 
I led my master through the streets, and begged his living 

too. 
Devoted to the poor, to please the wealthy was my care, 
Gleaning, as sustenance for one, what others well could 

spare ; 
Thus good I did, since to good deeds so many I inclined.' ' — 
Ah ! I suspected, little soul, thus much that I should find ! 

" Next, to breathe life into her charms, in a young girl I 

dwelt ; 
There, in soft prison, snugly housed, what happiness I felt ! 
Till to my hiding-place a swarm of Cupids entrance gained, 
And after pillaging it well, in garrison remained. 
Like old campaigners, there the rogues all sorts of mischief 

did : 
And night and day, whilst still I lay in little corner hid, 
How oft I saw the house on fire I scarce can call to mind." — 
Ah ! I suspected, little soul, thus much that I should find. 

" Some light on thy propensities may now upon thee break ; 
But prithee hark ! one more remark I still," says she, 

" would make. 
J T is this — that having dared one day with Heaven to make 

too free, 
God for my punishment resolved to shut me up in thee : 
And what with sittings up at night, with work and woman's 

art, 
Tears and despair — for I forbear some secrets to impart — 
A poet is a very hell for soul thereto consigned ! " 
Ah ! I suspected, little soul, thus much that I should find. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 175 

THE SONG OF THE EARTH SPIRITS. 

in goethe's " faust." 

The soul of man 
Is like the water : 
From heaven it cometh, 
To heaven it mounteth, 
And thence at once 
It must back to earth, 
Forever changing. 

THE SECRET OF REMINISCENCE. 

FROM SCHILLER. 

What unveils to me the yearning glow 
Fix'd forever to thy lips to grow ? 
What the longing wish thy breath to drink, — 
In thy Being blest, in death to sink 

When thy look steals o'er me ? 

As when Slaves without resistance yield 
To the Victor in the battle-field, 
So my Senses in the moment fly 
O'er the bridge of Life tumultuously 

When thou stand'st before me ! 

Speak ! Why should they from their Master roam ? 
Do my Senses yonder seek their home ? 
Or do sever'd brethren meet again, 
Casting off the Body's heavy chain, 

Where thy foot hath lighted ? 

Were our Beings once together twin'd ? 
Was it therefore that our bosoms pin'd ? 



176 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Were we in the light of suns now dead, 
In the days of rapture long since fled, 
Into One united ? 

Aye, we were so ! — thou wert link'd with me 
In iEone that has ceas'd to be ; 
On the mournful page of vanish'd time, 
By my Muse were read these words sublime : 
Nought thy love can sever ! 

And in Being closely twin'd and fair, 
I too wondering saw it written there, — 
We were then a Life, a Deity, — 
And the world seem'd order'd then to lie 

'Neath our sway forever. 

And, to meet us, nectar-fountains still 
Pour'd forever forth their blissful rill ; 
Forcibly we broke the seal of Things, 
And to Truth's bright sunny hills our wings 
Joyously were soaring. 

Laura, weep ! — this Deity hath flown, — 
Thou and I his ruins are alone ; 
By a thirst unquenchable we 're driven 
Our lost Being to embrace ; — tow'rd Heaven 
Turns our gaze imploring. 

Therefore, Laura, is this yearning glow 
Fix'd forever to thy lips to grow, 
And the longing wish thy breath to drink, 
In thy Being blest, in death to sink 

When thy look steals o'er me ! 

And as Slaves without resistance yield 
To the Victor in the battle-field, 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 177 

Therefore do my ravish'd Senses fly 
O'er the bridge of Life tumultuously, 

When thou stand 'st before me ! 

Therefore do they from their Master roam ! 
Therefore do my Senses seek their home ! 
Casting off the Body's heavy chain, 
Those long-sever'd brethren kiss again, 

Hush'd is all their sighing ! 

And thou, too — when on me fell thine eye, 
What disclos'd thy cheek's deep-purple dye ? 
Tow'rd each other, like relations dear, 
As an exile to his home draws near, 

Were we not then flying ? 



A SONNET ON CAUCASUS. 

BY T. CAMPANELLA. 

I fear that by my death the human race 

Would gain no vantage. Thus I do not die. 
So wide is this vast cage of misery 

That flight and change lead to no happier place. 

Shifting our pains, we risk a sorrier case : 
All worlds, like ours, are sunk in agony : 
Go where we will, we feel ; and this my cry 

I may forget like many an old disgrace. 

Who knows what doom is mine ? The Omnipotent 
Keeps silence ; nay, I know not whether strife 
Or peace was with me in some earlier life. 

Philip in a worse prison me hath pent 

These three days past — but not without God's will. 
Stay we as God decrees : God doth no ill. 



178 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 



PART IV. PLATONIC POETS. 



The largest inspiration of all western thought is 
nourished by the Academe. Not only idealism, but 
the provinces of philosophy and literature hostile to 
Plato are really indebted to him. The noble loftiness, 
the ethereal subtlety, the poetic beauty of that teach- 
ing has captivated most of the fine intellects of me- 
diaeval and modern times, and it is impossible to trace 
the invisible course of exalted thought which has 
radiated from this greatest Greek, the king of a 
nation of philosophers. 

Adopting Emerson's words, " Out of Plato come all 
things that are still written and debated among men 
of thought. Great havoc makes he among our origi- 
nalities. We have reached the mountain from which 
all these drift boulders were detached. The Bible of 
the learned for twenty-two centuries, every brisk 
young man who says fine things to each reluctant gen- 
eration, is some reader of Plato translating into the 
vernacular his good things. . . . How many great 
men nature is incessantly sending up out of the night 
to be his men — Platonists ! the Alexandrians, a con- 
stellation of genius ; the Elizabethans, not less ; Sir 
Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, 
Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Kalph Cudworth, Syden- 
ham, Thomas Taylor. Calvinism is in his Phaedro. 
Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its 
philosophy, in its handbook of morals, the Akhlak-y- 
Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 179 

texts." We know not how much of the world's later 
poetry is due to the suggestion and nurture of the 
poet-philosopher. But in closing our studies of the 
poetry of reincarnation it may be of interest to group 
together the avowed Platonic poets. 

Most illustrious of all the English disciples of this 
master, in the brilliant coterie of " Cambridge Pla- 
tonists," was Dr. Henry More, whom Dr. Johnson 
esteemed " one of our greatest divines and philos- 
ophers and no mean poet." Hobbes said of him that 
if his own philosophy was not true he knew none that 
he should sooner adopt than Henry More's of Cam- 
bridge ; and Hoadley styles him " one of the first 
men of this or any other country." Coleridge wrote 
that his philosophical works " contain more enlarged 
and elevated views of the Christian dispensation than 
I have met with in any other single volume ; for 
More had both the philosophical and poetic genius 
supported by immense erudition." He was a devout 
student of Plato. In the heat of rebellion he was 
spared by the fanatics. They pardoned his refusal to 
take their covenant and left him to continue the phil- 
osophic occupations which had rendered him famous 
as a lovable and absorbed scholar. He wove to- 
gether in many poems a quaint texture of Gothic 
fancy and Greek thought. His " Psychozoia " or 
" Life of the Soul," from which the following verses 
are taken, is a long Platonic poem tracing the course 
of the soul through ancient existences down into the 
earthly realm. Campbell said of this work that it " is 
like a curious grotto, whose labyrinths we might ex- 
plore for its strange and mystic associations." Dr. 
More was an intimate friend of Addison and long a 
correspondent of Descartes. 



180 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

From Henry More's " Philosophical Poems " 
("Psychozoia"). 

I would sing the preexistency 

Of human souls and live once o'er again 
By recollection and quick memory 

All that is passed since first we all began. 
But all too shallow be my wits to scan 

So deep a point and mind too dull to climb 
So dark a matter. But thou more than man 

Aread, thou sacred soul of Plotin dear, 
Tell me what mortals are. Tell what of old they were. 

A spark or ray of divinity 

Clouded with earthly fogs, and clad in clay, 
A precious drop sunk from eternity 

Spilt on the ground, or rather slunk away. 
For then we fell when we 'gan first t' essay 

By stealth of our own selves something to been 
Uncentering ourselves from our one great stay, 

Which rapture we new liberty did ween, 
And from that prank right jolly wits ourselves did deem. 

Show fitly how the preexisting soul 

Enacts and enters bodies here below 
And then entire unhurt can leave this moul, 

In which by sense and motion they may know 
Better than we what things transacted be 

Upon the earth, and when they best may show 
Themselves to friend or foe, their phantasmy 

Moulding their airy arc to gross consistency. 

Milton imbibed from his college friend Henry More 
an early fondness for the study of Plato, whose phi- 
losophy nourished most of the fine spirits of that day, 
and he expresses the Greek sage's opinion of the soul 
in his " Comus " : — 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 181 

The soul grows clotted by oblivion, 
Imbodies and embrutes till she quite lose 
The divine property of her first being ; 
Such as those thick and gloomy shadows damp 
Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres 
Lingering and setting by a new made grave 
As loth to leave the body that it loved. 

Milton's Platonic proclivities are also shown in his 
poem " On the Death of a Fair Infant " : — 

Wert thou that just maid, who once before 
Forsook the hated earth, tell me sooth, 
And cam'st again to visit us once more ? 
Or wert thou that sweet smiling youth ? 

Or any other of that heavenly brood 
Let down in cloudy throne to do the world some good ? 
Or wert thou of the golden-winged host, 
Who, having clad thyself in human weed, 
To earth from thy prefixed seat didst post, 
And after short abode fly back with speed 
As if to show what creatures heaven doth breed ; 

Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire, 
To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire. 

In the old library of poetry known as " Dodsley's 
Collection," is a Miltonic poem by an anonymous Pla- 
tonist which is very interesting, and as it is difficult of 
access we quote the best part of it. 

PBJEEXISTENCE. 

IN IMITATION OF MILTON. 

Now had th' archangel trumpet, raised sublime 
Above the walls of heaven, begun to sound ; 
All aether took the blast and fell beneath 
Shook with celestial noise ; th' almighty host, 



182 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

Hot with pursuit, and reeking with the blood 
Of guilty cherubs smeared in sulphurous dust, 
Pause at the known command of sounding gold. 
At first they close the wide Tartarean gates, 
Th' impenetrable folds on brazen hinge 
Roll creaking horrible ; the din beneath 
O'ercomes the war of flames, and deafens hell. 
Then through the solid gloom with nimble wing 
They cut their shining traces up to light ; 
Returned upon the edge of heavenly day, 
Where thinnest beams play round the vast obscure 
And with eternal gleam drives back the night. 
They find the troops less stubborn, less involved 
In crime and ruin, barr'd the realms of peace, 
Yet uncondemned to baleful beats of woe, 
Doubtful and suppliant ; all the plumes of light 
Moult from their shuddering wings, and sickly fear 
Shades every face with horror ; conscious guilt 
Rolls in the livid eyeball, and each breast 
Shakes with the dread of future doom unknown. 

'T is here the wide circumference of heaven 
Opens in two vast gates, that inward turn 
Voluminous, on jasper columns hung 
By geometry divine : they ever glow 
With living sculptures ; they arise by turns 
To imboss the shining leaves, by turns they set 
To give succeeding argument their place ; 
In holy hieroglyphics on they move, 
The gaze of journeying angels, as they pass 
Oft looking back, and held in deep surprise. 
Here stood the troops distinct ; the cherub guard 
Unbarred the splendid gates, and in they roll 
Harmonious ; for a vocal spirit sits 
Within each hinge, and \as they onward drive, 
In just divisions breaks the numerous jars 
With symphony melodious, such as spheres 
Involved in tenfold wreaths are said to sound. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 183 

Out flows a blaze of glory : for on high 
Towering advanced the moving throne of God. 

Above the throne, th' ideas heavenly bright 
Of past, of present, and of coming time, 
Fixed their immoved abode, and there present 
An endless landscape of created things 
To sight celestial, where angelic eyes 
Are lost in prospect ; for the shiny range 
Boundless and various in its bosom bears 
Millions of full proportioned worlds, beheld 
With steadfast eyes, till more arise to view, 
And further inward scenes start up unknown. 

A vocal thunder rolled the voice of God. 
" Servants of God ! and virtues great in arms, 
We approve your faithful works, and you return 
Blessed from the dire pursuits of rebel foes ; 
Resolved, obdurant, they have tried the force 
Of this right hand, and known almighty power ; 
Transfixed with lightning, down they sunk and fell 
Into the fiery gulf, and deep they plunge 
Below the burning waves, to hide their heads. 

" For you, ye guilty throng that lately joined 
In this sedition, since seduced from good, 
And caught in trains of guile, by sprites malign 
Superior in their order ; you accept, 
Trembling, my heavenly clemency and grace. 
When the long era once has filled its orb, 
You shall emerge to light and humbly here 
Again shall bow before his favoring throne, 
If your own virtue second my decree : 
But all must have their races first below. 
See, where below in chaos wondrous deep 
A speck of light dawns forth, and thence throughout 
The shades, in many a wreath, my forming power 



184 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

There swiftly turns the burning eddy round, 

Absorbing all crude matter near its brink ; 

Which next, with subtle motions, takes the form 

I please to stamp, the seed of embryo worlds 

All now in embryo, but ere long shall rise 

Variously scattered in this vast expanse, 

Involved in winding orbs, until the brims 

Of outward circles brush the heavenly gates. 

The middle point a globe of curling fire 

Shall hold, which round it sheds its genial heat ; 

Where'er I kindle life the motion grows, 

In all the endless orbs, from this machine ; 

And infinite vicissitudes that roll 

About the restless centre ; for I rear 

In those meanders turned, a dusty ball, 

Deformed all o'er with woods, whose shaggy tops 

Inclose eternal mists, and deadly damps 

Hover within their boughs, to cloak the light ; 

Impervious scenes of horror, till reformed 

To fields and grassy dells and flowery meads 

By your continual pains. . . . Here Silence sits 

In folds of wreathy mantling sunk obscure, 

And in dark fumes bending his drowsy head ; 

An urn he holds, from whence a lake proceeds 

Wide, flowing gently, smooth and Lethe named ; 

Hither compelled, each soul must drink long draughts 

Of those forgetful streams, till forms within 

And all the great ideas fade and die : 

For if vast thought should play about a mind 

Inclosed in flesh, and dragging cumbrous life, 

Fluttering and beating in the mournful cage, 

It soon would break its gates and wing away : 

'T is therefore my decree, the soul return 

Naked from off this beach, and perfect blank 

To visit the new world ; and wait to feel 

Itself in crude consistence closely shut, 

The dreadful monument of just revenge ; 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 185 

Immured by heaven's own hand, and placed erect 
On fleeting matter all imprisoned round 
With walls of clay ; the ethereal mould shall bear 
The chain of members, deafened with an ear, 
Blinded by eyes, and trammeled by hands. 
Here anger, vast ambition and disdain, 
And all the haughty movements rise and fall, 
As storms of neighboring atoms tear the soul, 
And hope and love and all the calmer turns 
Of easy hours, in their gay gilded shapes, 
With sudden run, skim o'er deluded minds, 
As matter leads the dance ; but one desire 
Unsatisfied, shall mar ten thousand joys. 

" The rank of beings, that shall first advance, 
Drink deep of human life, and long shall stay 
On this great scene of cares. From all the rest, 
That longer for the destined body wait, 
Less penance I expect, and short abode 
In those pale dreamy kingdoms will content ; 
Each has his lamentable lot, and all 
On different rocks abide the pains of life. 

" The pensive spirit takes the lonely grove ; 
Nightly he visits all the sylvan scenes, 
Where far remote, a melancholy moon 
Raising her head, serene and shorn of beams, 
Throws here and there her glimmerings through the 

trees. 
The sage shall haunt this solitary ground 
And view the dismal landscape limned within 
In horrid shades, mixed with imperfect light. 
Here Judgment, blinded by delusive sense, 
Contracted through the cranny of an eye, 
Shoots up faint languid beams to that dark seat, 
Wherein the soul, bereaved of native fire, 
Sets intricate, in misty clouds obscured. 

" Hence far removed, a different being race 



186 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

In cities full and frequent take their seat, 
Where honor 's crushed, and gratitude oppressed 
With swelling hopes of gain, that raise within 
A tempest, and driven onward by success, 
Can find no bounds. For creatures of a day 
Stretch their wide cares to ages ; full increase 
Starves their penurious soul, while empty sound 
Fills the ambitious ; that shall ever shrink, 
Pining with endless cares, while this shall swell 
To tympany enormous. Bright in arms 
Here shines the hero, out he fiercely leads 
A martial throng, his instruments of rage, 
To fill the world with death, and thin mankind. 

" There savage nature in one common lies 
And feels its share of hunger, care, and pain, 
Cheated by flying prey ; and now they tear 
Their panting flesh ; and deeply, darkly quaff 
Of human woe, even when they rudely sip 
The flowing stream, or draw the savory pulp 
Of nature's freshest viands ; fragrant fruits 
Enjoyed with trembling, and in danger sought. 

" But where the appointed limits of a law 
Fences the general safety of the world, 
No greater quiet reigns : the blended loads 
Of punishment and crime deform the world, 
And give no rest to man ; with pangs and throes 
He enters on the stage ; prophetic tears 
And infant cries prelude his future woes ; 
And all is one continual scene of gulf 
Till the sad sable curtain falls in death. 

" Then the gay glories of the living world 
Shall cast their empty varnish and retire 
Out of his feeble views ; the shapeless root 
Of wild imagination dance and play 
Before his eyes obscure ; till all in death 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 187 

Shall vanish, and the prisoner enlarged, 
Regains the flaming borders of the sky." 

He ended. Peals of thunder rend the heavens, 
And chaos, from the bottom turned, resounds. 
The mighty clangor ; all the heavenly host 
Approve the high decree, and loud they sing 
Eternal justice ; while the guilty troops, 
Sad with their doom, but sad without despair, 
Fall fluttering down to Lethe's lake, and there 
For penance, and the destined body wait. 

Shelley's Platonic leanings are well known. 1 The 
favorite Greek conceit of preexistence in many earlier 
lives may frequently be found in his poems. The title 
over one of his songs of unrest, " The World's Wan- 
derer," evidently alludes to himself, as do the lines 
in it 

" Like the world's rejected guest." 

The song of the spirits in " Prometheus Unbound " 
pictures vividly the human soul's descent into the 
gloom of the material world : — 

To the deep, to the deep, 

Down, down ! 
Through the shade of sleep, 
Through the cloudy strife 
Of Death and of Life, 
Through the veil and the bar 
Of things which seem and are, 
Even to the steps of the remotest throne, 

Down, down ! 

While the sound whirls around, 

Down, down ! 
As the fawn draws the hound, 

1 See Dowden's Life of Shelley, from which a suggestive inci- 
dent is quoted above, on page 92. 



188 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

As the lightning the vapor, 
As a weak moth, the taper ; 
Death, despair ; love, sorrow ; 
Time both ; to-day, to-morrow ; 
As steel obeys the spirit of the stone, 
Down, down ! 

In the depth of the deep, 

Down, down ! 
Like the veiled lightning asleep, 
Like the spark nursed in embers, 
The last look Love remembers, 
Like a diamond which shines 
On the dark wealth of mines, 
A spell is treasured but for thee alone, 

Down, down ! 

The last stanza of "The Cloud" is Shelley's Platonic 
symbol of human life : — 

I am the daughter of earth and water 

And the nursling of the sky, 
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores, 

I change, but I cannot die. 
For after the rain when with never a stain 

The pavilion of heaven is bare, 
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams 

Build up the blue dome of air, 
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, 

And out of the caverns of rain, 
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, 

I arise and unbuild it again. 

Another poem, entitled " A Fragment," certainly 
refers to preexistenee : — 

Ye gentle visitants of calm thought, 

Moods like the memories of happier earth 
Which come arrayed in thoughts of little worth 

Like stars in clouds by weak winds enwrought. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 189 
THE RETREAT. 

BY HENRY VAUGHAN. 

Happy those early days when I 
Shined in my angel-infancy, 
Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 
Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
But a white celestial thought ; 
When yet I had not walked above 
A mile or two from my first love, 
And, looking back, at that short space, 
Could see a glimpse of his bright face ; 
When on some gilded cloud or flower 
My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
And in those weaker glories spy 
Some shadows of eternity ; 
Before I taught my tongue to wound 
My conscience with a sinful sound ; 
Or had the black art to dispense 
A several sin to every sense, 
But felt through all this flashy dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness. 

Oh, how I long to travel back 
And tread again that ancient track ! 
That I might once more reach that plain 
Where first I left my glorious train ; 
From whence the enlightened spirit sees 
That shady city of palm-trees. 
But ah ! my soul with too much stay 
Is drunk and staggers in the way. 
Some men a forward motion love, 
But I by backward steps would move, 
And when this dust falls to the urn, 
In that state I came, return. 



190 THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 

In Emerson, the Plato of the nineteenth century, 
the whole feeling of the Greek seems reflected in its 
most glorious development. Many of his poems clearly 
suggest the influence of his Greek teacher, as his 
" Threnody " upon the death of his young son, and 
" The Sphinx " in which these two stanzas ap- 
pear : — 

To vision profounder 

Man's spirit must dive ; 
His aye-rolling orb 

At no goal will arrive ; 
The heavens that now draw him 

With sweetness untold, 
Once found for new heavens 
He spurneth the old. 

Eterne alteration 

Now follows, now flies, 
And under pain, pleasure — 

Under pleasure, pain lies. 
Love works at the centre, 

Heart-heaving alway; 
Forth speed the strong pulses 

To the borders of day. 

Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, the friend of Bishop Ken 
and of Dr. Isaac Watts, has left this allusion to pre- 
existence in 

A HYMN ON HEAVEN. 

Ye starry mansions, hail ! my native skies ! 
Here in my happy, preexistent state 
(A spotless mind) I led the life of Gods, 
But passing, I salute you, and advance 
To yonder brighter realms, allowed access. 
Hail, splendid city of the almighty king, 
Celestial salem, situate above, etc. 



THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION. 191 

Some of the common church hymns glow with the 
enthusiasm of Platonic preexistence, and are fondly 
sung by Christians without any thought that, while 
their idea is of Biblical origin, it has been nourished 
and perpetuated by the Greek sage, and directly im- 
plies reincarnation. For instance : — 

" I 'm but a stranger, here, heaven is my home. 
Heaven is my fatherland, heaven is my home." 

" My Ain Countrie." 

" This world where grief and sin abideth, 
Is not the Christian's native clime." 

" The home-land, blessed home-land." 

" Jerusalem, my happy home." 



VI. 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 



The ancient theologists and priests testify that the soul is conjoined 
to the body through a certain punishment, and that it is buried in this 
body as in a sepulchre. — Philolaus, (a Pythagorean.) 

Search thou the path of the soul, whence she came, or what way, 
after serving the body, by joining work with sacred speed, thou shalt 
raise her again to the same state whence she fell. — Zoroaster. 

Death has no power th' immortal soul to slay, 
That, when its present body turns to clay, 
Seeks a fresh home, and with unlessened might 
Inspires another frame with' life and light. 
So I myself (well I the past recall), 
When the fierce Greeks begirt Troy's holy wall, 
Was brave Euphorbus : and in conflict drear 
Poured forth my blood beneath Atrides' spear. 
The shield this arm did bear I lately saw 
In Juno's shrine, a trophy of that war. 

Pythagoras, in Dryden's Ovid. 

He [Plato] spoke of Him 
The lone, eternal One, who dwells above, 
And of the soul's untraceable descent 
From that high fount of spirit, through all the grades 
Of intellectual being, till it mix 
With atoms vague, corruptible and dark. 
Nor yet ev'n thus, though sunk in earthly dross, 
Corrupted all, nor its ethereal touch 
Quite lost, but tasting of the fountain still 
As some bright river, which has rolled along 
Through meads of flowery light and mines of gold 
When poured at length into the dusky deep 
Disdains to take at once its briny taint, 
But keeps unchanged awhile the lustrous tinge 
Or balmy freshness of the scenes it left. 

Moore. 



VI. 

REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

The origin of the philosophy of reincarnation is 
prehistoric. It antedates the remotest antiquity all 
over the world, and appears to be cognate with man- 
kind, springing up spontaneously as a necessary corol- 
lary of the immortality of the soul ; for its undimin- 
ished sway has been wellnigh universal outside of 
Christendom. In the earliest dawn of Mother India 
it was firmly established. The infancy of Egypt 
found it dominant on the Nile. It was at home in 
Greece long before Pythagoras. The most ancient 
beginnings of Mexico and Peru knew it as the faith 
of their fathers. 

I. In sketching the course of this thought among 
the men of old, the first attention belongs to India. 
Brahmanism, the most primitive form of this faith, 
has gone through vast changes during the four thou- 
sand years of history. The initial form of it, dating 
back into the remotest mists of antiquity and descend- 
ing to the first chapters of authentic chronology, was 
an ideally simple nature-worship. The Rig- Veda and 
the oldest sacred hymns display the beauty of this ado- 
ration for every phase of nature, centering with espe- 
cial fondness upon light as the supreme power, and upon 
the cow as the favorite animal. Professor Wilson's 



196 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

and Max Miiller's translations have opened to the 
English race the charming thought of this primordial 
people, whose great child-souls found objects of rever- 
ence in all things. There were no distinct gods, but 
everything was divine, and through all they saw the 
flow of ever-changing life. Gradually an ecclesiasti- 
cal system climbed up around this religion, clothing, 
stifling, and at last burying the vital organism, until 
Sakya Muni's reaction started Buddhism into vigorous 
growth as the beautiful protest against the disfigured 
and decayed form. About Buddhism, too, there has 
arisen a heavy weight of lifeless ritual, but every breath 
of life with which the slumbering mother and daughter 
continue their existence is perfumed with the rose- 
attar of reincarnation. How they have since contin- 
ued to disseminate the idea of reincarnation is sug- 
gested in chapter ix, for the East of to-day is essen- 
tially a sculptured picture of what has been monoto- 
nously enduring for twenty centuries. 

Of the ancient Indians we learn through Pliny, 
Strabo, Megasthenes, Plutarch, and Herodotus, who 
describe the Gymnosophists and Brachmans as ascetic 
philosophers who made a study of spiritual things, liv- 
ing singly or in celibate communities much like the 
later Pj^thagoreans. Porphyry says of them : " They 
live without either clothes, riches or wives. They are 
held in so great veneration by the rest of their coun- 
trymen that the king himself often visits them to ask 
their advice. Such are their views of death that with 
reluctance they endure life as a piece of necessary 
bondage to nature, and haste to set the soul at liberty 
from the body. Nay, often, wdien in good health, and 
no evil to disturb them, they depart life, advertising 
it beforehand. No man hinders them, but all reckon 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 197 

them happy, and send commissions along with them to 
their dead friends. So strong and firm is their belief 
of a future life for the soul, where they shall enjoy one 
another, after receiving all their commands, they de- 
liver themselves to the fire, that they may separate the 
soul as pure as possible from the body, and expire 
singing hymns. Their old friends attend them to 
death with more ease than other men their fellow-citi- 
zens to a long journey. They deplore their own state 
for surviving them and deem them happy in their im- 
mortality." When Alexander the Great first pene- 
trated their country he could not persuade them to 
appear before him, and had to gratify his curiosity 
about their life and philosophy by proxy, though he 
afterward witnessed them surrender themselves to the 
flames. 

II. Herodotus asserts that the doctrine of metemp- 
sychosis originated in Egypt. "The Egyptians are 
the first who propounded the theory that the human 
soul is imperishable, and that where the body of any 
one dies it enters into some other creature that may 
be ready to receive it, and that when it has gone the 
round of all created forms on land, in water and in 
air, then it once more enters a human body born for 
it ; and that this cycle of existence for the soul takes 
place in three thousand years." x He continues, " Some 
of the Greeks adopted this opinion, some earlier, oth- 
ers later, as if it were their own." 

The Egyptians held that the human race began after 
the pure gods and spirits had left earth, when the de- 
mons who were sinfully inclined had revolted and in- 
troduced guilt. The gods then created human bodies 

1 It will be noticed later that Plato reduced this term to one 
thousand years. 



198 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

for these demons to inhabit, as a means of expiating 
their sin, and these fallen spirits are the present men 
and women, whose earthly life is a course of purifica- 
tion. All the Egyptian precepts and religious codes 
are to this end. The judgment after death decides 
whether the soul has attained purity or not. If not, 
the soul must return to earth in renewal of its expia- 
tion either in the body of a man, or animal or plant. 
As the spirit was believed to maintain its connection 
with the material form as long as this remained, the 
practice of embalming was designed to arrest the pas- 
sage of the soul into other forms. The custom of em- 
balming is also connected with their opinion that after 
three thousand years away from the body the soul 
would return to its former body provided it be pre- 
served from destruction. 1 If it is not preserved, the 
soul would enter the most convenient habitation, 
which might be a wretched creature. They maintained, 
too, that the gods frequently inhabited the bodies of 
animals, and therefore they worshiped animals as in- 
carnations of special divinities. The sacred bodies of 
these godly visitants were also embalmed as a mark of 
respect to their particular class of deities. For they 
placed certain gods in certain animals, the Egyptian 
Apollo choosing the hawk, Mercury the ibis, Mars the 
fish, Diana the cat, Bacchus the goat, Hercules the 
colt, Vulcan the ox, etc. This conceit was but a spe- 
cialization of their general tenet of pantheism, insisting 
that all life is divine, that every living thing must be 
venerated, and that the highest creatures should be 
most devoutly worshiped. 

1 Egyptologists disagree as to the real intent of embalming. 
We select the explanations best adapted to the theological doc- 
trines of the Egyptians. 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 199 

The Egyptian conception of reincarnation as shaped 
by the priesthood is displayed in their classic, " Ritual 
of the Dead," which is one of their chief sacred books 
and describes the course of the soul after death. A 
copy of it was deposited in each mummy case. It 
opens with a sublime dialogue between the soul and 
the God of Hades, Osiris, to whose realm he asks ad- 
mission. Finally Osiris says, " Fear nothing, but cross 
the threshold." As the soul enters he is dazzled with 
the glory of light. He sings a hymn to the sun and 
goes on taking the food of knowledge. After fright- 
ful dangers are passed, rest and refreshment come. 
Continuing his journey he reaches at last heaven's 
gate, where he is instructed in profound mysteries. 
Within the gate he is transformed into different ani- 
mals and plants. After this the soul is reunited to 
the body for which careful embalming was so impor- 
tant. A critical examination tests his right to cross 
the subterranean river to Elysium. He is conducted 
by Anubis through a labyrinth to the judgment hall 
of Osiris, where forty-two judges question him upon 
his whole past life. If the decisive judgment approves 
him he enters heaven. If not, he is sentenced to pass 
through lower forms of existence according to his sins, 
or, if a reprobate, is given over to the powers of dark- 
ness for purgation. After three thousand years of 
this he is again consigned to a human probation. 

III. Of the old Persian faith, it is difficult to ob- 
tain a trustworthy statement, except what is derived 
from its present form among the Parsees. The Magi, 
Zoroaster's followers, believed that the immortal soul 
descended from on high for a short period of lives in 
a mortal body to gain experience, and to then return 
again. When the soul is above it has several abodes, 



200 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

one luminous, another dark, and some filled with a 
mixture of light and darkness. Sometimes it sinks 
into the body from the luminous abode and after a 
virtuous life returns above ; but if coming from the 
dark region, it passes an evil life and enters a worse 
place in proportion to her conduct until purified. The 
dualism of these fire-worshipers gave reincarnation 
a briefer period of operation than the other oriental 
religions. 

IV. Pythagoras is mentioned by a Greek tradition 
as one of the Greeks who visited India before the age 
of Alexander. It is almost certain that he went to 
Egypt and received there the doctrine of transmigra- 
tion which he taught in the Greek cities of lower Italy 
(b. c. 529). Jamblichus says: " He spent twelve years 
at Babylon, freely conversing with the Magi, was in- 
structed in everything venerable among them, and 
learned the most perfect worship of the gods." He is 
said to have represented the human soul as an emana- 
tion of the world soul, partaking of the divine nature. 
At death it leaves one body to take another and so 
goes through the circle of appointed forms. Ovid's 
" Metamorphoses " contains a long description of the 
Pythagorean idea, from which these verses are taken, 
as translated by Dryden : — 

" Souls cannot die. They leave a former home, 

And in new bodies dwell, and from them roam. 

Nothing can perish, all things change below, 

For spirits through all forms may come and go. 

Good beasts shall rise to human forms, and men, 

If bad, shall backward turn to beasts again. 

Thus, through a thousand shapes, the soul shall go 

And thus fulfill its destiny below." 

But it is very difficult to determine exactly what 
the views of Pythagoras were. Aristotle, Plato, and 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 201 

Diogenes Laertius say he taught that the soul when 
released by death must pass through a grand circle of 
living forms before reaching the human again. From 
Pythagoras himself we have only some aphorisms of 
practical wisdom and symbolic sentences ; from his 
disciples a few fragments — all devoid of the grotesque 
hypothesis generally ascribed to him. Although his 
name is synonymous with the transmigration of human 
souls through animal bodies, the strong probabilities 
are that if this doctrine came from him it was entirely 
exoteric, concealing the inner truth of reincarnation. 
Some of his later disciples, especially the author of 
the work which is attributed to Timaeus the Locian, 
denied that he taught it in any literal sense, and said 
that by it he meant merely to emphasize the fact that 
men are assimilated in their vices to the beasts. (See 
Chapter xii.) 

V. Plato is called by Emerson the synthesis of 
Europe and Asia, and a decidedly oriental element 
pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise color. He 
had traveled in Egypt and Asia Minor and among the 
Pythagoreans of Italy. As he died (b. c. 348) twenty 
years before Alexander's invasion of India he missed 
that opportunity of learning the Hindu ideas. 

In the great " myth," or allegory, of Phaedrus, the 
classic description of the relation of the soul to the 
material world, what he says of the judgment upon 
mankind and their subsequent return to human or 
animal bodies coincides substantially with the Egyp- 
tian and Hindu religions. But his theory of pre- 
existence and of absolute knowledge seems to be orig- 
inal. It grows out of his cardinal doctrine (and that 
of his master Socrates) concerning the reality and 



202 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

validity of truth, in opposition to the skepticism of 
contemporary sophists, who claimed that truth is mere 
subjective opinion — what each man troweth. 

The Phaedrus myth is evidently suggested by the 
splendid religious procession which closed the Athenian 
festival. With gorgeous ceremony nearly the whole 
city's population participated in this crowning glory 
of their most sacred holiday. The procession wound 
through the finest streets of the city and then up the 
steep ascent of the Acropolis, whose precipitous in- 
cline kept the horses struggling for a foothold. That 
elevated site commanded a view of the busy city, 
the plains beyond, and the distant mountains and sea 
under the deep blue canopy of the Greek sky, pre- 
senting to the worshipers' sight a panorama of the 
changing aspects of human life and a type of heaven's 
repose. From this picture the poet-philosopher con- 
jures up a sublimer procession marshalled by the 
king of gods and men, moving through the heavenly 
orbits of the soul's progress, until they ascend the 
celestial dome itself, whence the soul may gaze upon 
the unspeakable glories of spiritual Truth. 1 

The Socrates of the dialogue first likens the soul to 
" a winged team and their charioteer. In the case of 
the gods both horses and charioteer are all good and 
of good breed ; those of the rest are mixed. And 
first of all, our charioteer drives a pair ; in the next 
place, the one is good and noble in itself and by 
breed, while the other is the opposite in both regards. 
And so the management of the chariot must needs be 
difficult and harassing. Just how the living being 
which is immortal is distinguished from that which is 

1 See the article on " Pre-existence," in the Penn Monthly x 
September, 1877. 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 203 

mortal, I must endeavor to tell you. All that is soul 
has the charge of that which is soulless, and traverses 
the whole heaven, appearing now in one form, now in 
another. When perfect and possessed of wings, she 
moves in mid air and controls the whole world 
(kosmos). But if she lose her feathers, she is borne 
hither and thither until she lays hold of something 
that is fixed and solid, and there making her home, 
and taking to herself an earthly body, which seems to 
be self-moved by reason of the force she furnishes, 
soul and body are fastened together and come to be 
called mortal. . . . But let us take up the reason of 
that stripping off the feathers by which the soul is 
brought to its fall. It is as follows : The power of 
the wing is designed to bear up that which is heavy 
through mid air, where the race of the gods dwells, 
and of all that is corporeal this has most in common 
with the divine ; for the divine is the beautiful, the 
wise, the good, and everything of the sort, and by 
these the wing of the soul is nourished and groweth 
especially. But by what is base and evil, and what- 
ever else is the opposite of divine, it wastes away and 
is destroyed. 

" Now Zeus, the great Leader in heaven, leads the 
van, driving a winged chariot, the marshal and guar- 
dian of all. And he is followed by the host of the 
gods and demons marshalled in eleven bands, for 
Hestia alone remaineth in the house of the gods, and 
those of the rest who belong to the number of The 
Twelve [Great Gods] lead on as captains of their 
companies, each in the order to which he has been 
assigned. Now there are within heaven many and 
blessed views and ways of passage in which the race 
of the happy gods pass to and fro, each of them doing 



204 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

his own work, and whoever can and will follows, for 
envy stands aloof from the choir of the gods. 

" But whenever they go to banquet and to feast, 
then they proceed all together up towards the lofty 
vault of heaven. Now the chariots of the gods, being- 
well balanced and obedient to the rein, proceed easily, 
but the rest with difficulty. For the horse that par- 
takes of evil slips downward, sinking and gravitating 
towards the earth, if he has not been properly broken 
in by the charioteer. Then it is that toil and ex- 
tremest conflict press hard upon the soul. But those 
souls which are called immortal, when they reach 
the summit, go forth and stand upon the back [the 
convex] of the heaven, and as they stand the revolu- 
tion [of the sphere] carries them around with it, and 
they behold the things which are outside of the 
heaven. 

"Now the place which is above the heaven no 
earthly poet has ever praised as it deserves, nor ever 
will : but it is thus. For I must dare to tell the 
truth, especially when I am talking about Truth. The 
colorless, formless, and intangible Being which is Be- 
ing, is visible only to the Reason (iious), which is the 
governor of the soul. Round about this [pure Being] 
is located the true sort of knowledge. Since then the 
intelligence of God — like that of every soul in so far 
as it is to receive what best befits it — is nourished on 
Reason and pure Knowledge, in beholding at last the 
Being it loves it, and in contemplating the Truth is 
nourished and gladdened, until the revolution [of the 
sphere] brings it round again to its starting-place. 
And in this circuit it beholds Righteousness itself, be- 
holds Temperance itself, beholds Knowledge — not 
that which has origin, nor that which differs in the 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 205 

different things to which we ascribe existence, but 
Knowledge which has a real being in that which is 
Being indeed. And other equally real existences she 
beholds and is feasted upon, and then reentering the 
heaven she returns homeward. And when she has 
come thither, the charioteer, staying his horses at their 
stall, fodders them with ambrosia, and waters them 
with nectar. And this is the life of the gods. 

" But as to the other souls, that which best follows 
God and is most like Him lifts up the head of the 
charioteer to the place outside the heaven, and is car- 
ried around the revolution with Him, disturbed indeed 
by the horses, and beholding the things which have 
true being with difficulty. Another lifts up the head 
at times, at others draws it in because compelled by 
the horses, and therefore beholds some and not others ; 
the rest one and all desire and follow that which is 
above, but not being able to reach it, they are carried 
around submerged beneath the heaven, they tread and 
fall upon each other, each trying to get precedence of 
the other. Noise, and rivalry, and sweat to the last 
degree ensue, whereupon many are maimed in their 
wings by the fault of their charioteers. And all of 
them, after long toil, depart uninitiated into the vision 
of Being, and when they have gone are fed on the 
food of opinion. Whence then that great desire of 
theirs to behold the plain of Truth ? Is it not because 
the pasturage which befits what is best in the soul 
happens to grow in that meadow, and the growth of 
the wing by which the soul soars is nourished with 
this? 

" And this is this law of Adrastea [or Nemesis, the 
inevitable Order] : whatsoever soul has shared with 
God, in beholding any of those things that are true 



206 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

and real, is unharmed until the next period, and if 
she is always able to do this, is always unhurt. But 
should it happen that she cannot follow on to know* 
and by any mischance grows heavy through being 
filled with forgetfulness and faultiness, and through 
that heaviness loses her feathers and falls to the earth, 
then the law is that this soul shall not take upon her 
the nature of any beast in the first generation [or 
birth], but the soul that has seen most shall come to 
the birth of a man who is to be a philosopher, or an 
artist, or of some musician and lover ; and the second, 
[to the birth] of a lawful king, or warrior and ruler ; 
the third, of a statesman, or of some financier, or man 
of affairs ; the fourth, of a toil-loving gymnast, or of 
some one who is to be a physician ; the fifth, the life 
of a soothsayer, or some hierophantic function ; to 
the sixth, the life of a poet, or of some other sort of 
mimic, will be suitable ; to the seventh, that of an 
artisan or a husbandman ; to the eighth, that of a 
sophist or a demagogue ; to the ninth, that of a tyrant. 
And whoever in any of these positions conducts him- 
self rightly receives a better lot ; but whoever be- 
haves otherwise, a worse. 

" No soul arrives at that place from whence it came 
for ten thousand years, except it be that one who is 
honestly a philosopher, or a lover who has a share of 
philosophy. These in the third period of a thousand 
years, if thrice successively they have chosen this 
manner of life, and have thus received their wings, 
depart thither in the three thousandth year. But the 
rest, when they have finished the first life assigned 
them, undergo a judgment. And after the judgment, 
some of them proceed to the prison-house under the 
earth and receive punishment ; and the others, having 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 207 

been raised by the judgment to a place in the heaven, 
pass their time in a manner worthy of the life they 
lived in human form. 

" And when, in the thousandth year, they come to 
a casting of lots and a choice of their second life, 
each chooses whichever she wishes. And thereupon 
a human soul comes to the life of a beast ; and one 
that has been a man becomes from a beast a man 
again. 

" But that soul which lias never beheld the Truth 
will never come into this [human] form ; the under- 
standing of general truth collected from many percep- 
tions into unity by rational thought is an essential of 
humanity. And this is the recollection of those things 
which our soul has once seen when accompanying God, 
and disdaining those things which we now speak of 
as being, and lifting up our heads to behold true Be- 
ing. Wherefore it is just that the intelligence of the 
philosopher alone receives wings ; for he is ever with 
all his might busied with the recollections of these 
things, occupation with which makes God what he is. 
And only the man who makes right use of such recol- 
lections, and thus continually attains initiation into 
perfect mysteries, becomes truly perfect ; and for giv- 
ing up human pursuits and becoming enwrapt in the 
divine, he is esteemed by the many as beside himself, 
for they fail to see that he is God-possessed. 

... u As has been said, every human soul is by 
nature a beholder of Being, else she would . not have 
entered into this form of life. But it is not easy 
for every soul to awaken those recollections which she 
brought from thence, or they may then have had but 
scant vision of what was there, or since they have 
fallen thence they may have had the mischance to be 



208 REINCARNA TION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

diverted by bad associations to that which is unjust, 
and to fall into forgetfulness of the holy things which 
they then beheld. A few are left, who retain enough 
of the recollection ; but whenever they behold any 
resemblance of what is there, they are struck with 
astonishment, and are no longer masters of them- 
selves ; but they know not why they are thus af- 
fected, because they have no adequate perception. 
But there is no brilliancy in those earthly like- 
nesses of justice and temperance, and whatever else 
is precious to the soul ; for through obscure instru- 
ments, it is given with difficulty and to but few to 
draw near to those images and behold what manner 
of thing it is that they represent. But then it was 
permitted to behold Beauty in all its splendor, when 
along with the blessed chorus, we [philosophers] fol- 
lowing Zeus, others some other of the gods, we shared 
in the beatific vision and contemplation, and were in- 
itiated into mysteries which it is just to call the most 
perfect of all, and whose rapturous feast we kept in 
innocence, and while still inexpert of those evils which 
were awaiting us in a time still future. And we be- 
held visions innocent and simple and peaceful and 
happy, as if spectators at the mysteries, in pure array, 
ourselves pure, and without a sign upon us of this 
which we now carry about with us and call a body, 
and are bound thereto like an oyster to his shell. Let 
us indulge in these memories, whereby we are led to 
speak the longer from desire of the things which we 
then saw." 1 

We penetrate into the inmost secret of Plato's 
thought in the super-celestial plain, the dwelling-place 
of substantial ideas, the essential Truth, the absolute 
1 From Jowett's translation. 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 209 

knowledge, in which the pure Being holds the supreme 
place which we assign to God, the Hindu to Brahm, 
and the Egyptian to Osiris, but which the polytheist 
could not ascribe to his gods. Plato, like the in- 
itiated priests of India and Egypt, to whom the high- 
est deity was nameless, knew the objects of common 
worship were but exalted men, above whom was One 
whose nature was undisclosed to men, and of whom it 
was audacious childishness to assert human attributes. 
The Highest was the centra of those Eealities dimly 
shadowed in earthly appearance, and Plato's pictorial 
representation of his thought is only a parable cloak- 
ing the essential principle that during the eternal 
past we have strayed from the real Truth through 
repeated lives into the present. 

Of Plato's philosophy of preexistence, Professor W. 
A. 'Butler says in his masterly lectures on Ancient 
Philosophy : " It is certain that with Plato the con- 
viction was associated with a vast and pervading prin- 
ciple, which extended through every department of 
nature and thought. This principle was the priority 
of mind to body, both in order of dignity and in 
order of time ; a principle which with him was not 
satisfied by the single admission of a divine preexist- 
ence, but extended through every instance in which 
these natures could be compared. A very striking 
example of the manner in which he thus generalized 
the principle of priority of mind to body is to be 
found in the well-known passage in the tenth book of 
his ' Laws,' in which he proves the existence of di- 
vine energy. The argument employed really applies 
to every case of motion and equally proves that every 
separate corporeal system is but a mechanism moved 
by a spiritual essence anterior to itself. The universe 



210 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

is full of gods, and the human soul is, as it were, the 
god or demon of the human body." 

VI. The Jews had the best parallel of Plato's 
Phaedrus in the third chapter of Genesis, describing 
the fall of Adam and Eve. The theological comments 
upon that popular summary of the origin of sin have 
always groped after reincarnation, by making all 
Adam's descendants responsible in him for that act. 
Many Jewish scholars undertook to fuse Greek phi- 
losophy with their national religion. The Septuagint 
translation, made in the third century before Christ, 
gives evidence of such a purpose in suppressing the 
strong anthropomorphic terms by which the Old 
Testament mentioned God. Aristobulus, a Jewish- 
Greek poet of the second century, writes of Hebrew 
ideas in Platonic phrases. Similar passages are found 
in Aristeas and in the second book of the Maccabees. 
Pythagoreanism was blended with Judaism in the 
beliefs and practices of the Jewish Therapeutse of 
Egypt, and their brethren the Essenes of Palestine. 

Of the Essenes, Josephus writes : " The opinion ob- 
tains among them that bodies indeed are corrupted, 
and the matter of them not permanent, but that souls 
continue exempt from death forever ; and that ema- 
nating from the most subtle ether they are unfolded in 
bodies as prisons to which they are drawn by some 
natural spell. But when loosed from the bonds of 
flesh, as if released from a long captivity, they rejoice 
and are borne upward." 

The most prominent Jewish writer upon this sub- 
ject is Philo of Alexandria, who lived in the time of 
Christ, and adapted a popular version of Platonic 
ideas to the religion of his own people. He turned 
the Hebrew stories into remarkably deft Platonic .at 



REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 211 

legories. His theory of preexistence and rebirths is 
practically that of his master Plato, as is shown in 
this extract : " The company of disembodied souls is 
distributed in various orders. The law of some of 
them is to enter mortal bodies and after certain pre- 
scribed periods be again set free. But those possessed 
of a diviner structure are absolved from all local 
bonds of earth. Some of these souls choose confine- 
ment in mortal bodies because they are earthly and 
corporeally inclined. Others depart, being released 
again according to supernaturally determined times 
and seasons. Therefore, all such as are wise, like 
Moses, are living abroad from home. For the souls 
of such formerly chose this expatriation from heaven, 
and through curiosity and the desire of acquiring 
knowledge they came to dwell abroad in earthly na- 
ture, and while they dwell in the body they look 
down on things visible and mortal around them, and 
urge their way thitherward again whence they came 
originally: and call that heavenly region in which 
they live their citizenship, fatherland, but this earthly 
in which they live, foreign." In choosing between 
the Mosaic and the Platonic account of the Fall, as 
to which best expressed the essential truth, although 
a Jew, he decided for Plato. He considers men as 
fallen spirits attracted by material desires and thus 
brought into the body's prison, yet of kin to God and 
the ideal world. The philosophic life is the means of 
escape, with the aid of the divine Logos, or Spirit, to 
the blessed fellowship from which they have fallen. 
Regeneration is a purification from matter. Philo re- 
nounced the creed of his fathers in order to reform it, 
and his influence was profoundly felt for centuries. 
The origin of the Jewish Cabala is involved in end- 



212 REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS. 

less dispute. Jewish scholars claim that it is prehis- 
toric. Although a portion of it is held to have been 
composed in the Middle Ages, it is certain that its 
teachings had been handed down by tradition from 
very early times, and that some parts come from the 
Jewish philosophers of Alexandria and others from 
the later Neo-Platonists and Gnostics. Preexistence 
and reincarnation appear here, not in Philo's specula- 
tive form of it, but in a much simpler and more mat- 
ter-of-fact character, — affirming that human spirits 
are again and again born into the world, after long in- 
tervals, and in entire forgetfulness of their previous 
experiences. This is not a curse, as in Plato's re- 
ligions, but a blessing, being the process of purifica- 
tion by repeated probations. "All the souls," says 
the Zohar, or Book of Light, " are .subject to the 
trial 1 : of transmigration ; and men do not know which 
are the ways of the Most High in their regard. They 
do not know how many transformations and mysteri- 
ous trials they must undergo ; how many souls and 
spirits come to this world without returning to the 
palace of the divine king. The souls must reenter the 
absolute substance whence they have emerged. But 
to accomplish this end they must develop all the per- 
fections, the germ of which is planted in them ; and 
if they have not fulfilled this condition during one 
life, they must commence another, a third, and so 
forth, until they have acquired the condition which 
fits them for reunion with God." 



vn. 

REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 



Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old. 

Emerson. 

The more diligently the student works this mine (the Bible), the 
richer and more abundant he finds the ore ; new light continually 
beams from this source of heavenly knowledge to direct and illustrate 
the work of God and the ways of men. — Sir Walter Scott. 

The divine oracles are not so silent in this matter as is imagined. 
But truly I have so tender a sense of the sacred authority of that holy 
volume that I dare not be so bold with it as to force it to speak what 
I think it intends not. Wherefore I would not willingly urge Scrip- 
ture as a proof of anything, but what I am sure by the whole tenor 
of it is therein contained. Would I take the liberty to fetch in every- 
thing for a Scripture evidence that with a little industry a man might 
make serviceable to his design, I doubt not but I should be able to fill 
my margent with quotations which should be as much to purpose as 
have been cited in general Catechisms and Confessions of Faith. . . . 
And yet I must needs say that there is very fair probability for Pre- 
existence in the written word of God, as there is in that which is en- 
graved upon our rational natures. — Glanvil, in Lux Orientalis. 



VII. 

REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 

The vitality of the doctrine of Reincarnation does 
not in the least depend upon a scriptural endorsement 
of it, but the fact that it is surprisingly conspicuous 
here is certainly interesting and confirmatory. Every 
candid Christian student must acknowledge that the 
revelation of truth is no more confined to the central 
book of Christendom than sunshine is limited to the 
Orient. There must be great principles of philosophy, 
like that of evolution, outside of the Bible ; and yet 
the most skeptical thinker has to concede that this 
volume is the richest treasury of wisdom, — the best 
of which is still unlearned. 

Although most Christians are unaware of it, rein- 
carnation is strongly present in the Bible, chiefly in 
the form of preexistence. It is not inculcated as a 
doctrine- essential to redemption. Neither is immor- 
tality. But it is taken for granted, cropping out here 
and there as a fundamental rock. Some scholars 
consider it an unimportant oriental speculation which 
is accidentally entangled into the texture. But the 
uniform strength and beauty of its hold seem to rank 
it with the other essential threads of the warp upon 
which is woven the noblest fabric of religious thought. 



216 REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 

A sufficient evidence of the Biblical support of pre- 
existence, and of the consequent wide-spread belief in 
it among the Jews, is found in Solomon's long refer- 
ence to it among his Proverbs. The wise king wrote 
of himself : " The Lord possessed me in the beginning 
of his way before the works of old. I was set up 
from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the 
earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought 
forth ; when there were no foundations abounding 
with water. Before the mountains were settled, before 
the hills was I brought forth : while as yet he had not 
made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of 
the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens 
I was there : when he set a compass upon the face of 
the depth : when he established the clouds above : 
when he strengthened the foundations of the deep: 
wjien he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters 
should not pass his commandment : when he appointed 
the foundations of the earth : then I was by him, as 
one brought up with him : and I was daily his de- 
light, rejoicing always before him ; rejoicing in the 
habitable part of the earth ; and my delights were 
with the sons of men." l This passage disposes of 
the theory of Delitzsch that preexistence in the Bible 
means simply an existence in the foreknowledge of 
the creator. Such a mere foreknowledge would not 
place him previous to the parts of creation which pre- 
ceded his earthly appearance. And the last two 
clauses clearly express a prior physical life. The 
prophets, too, are assured of their pre-natal antiquity. 
Jeremiah hears Jehovah tell him, " Before I formed 
thee in the belly I knew thee ; and before thou earnest 
forth out of the womb I sanctified thee." 2 

1 Proverbs viii. 22-31, ? Jeremiah i. 5. - 



REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 217 

Skipping passages of disputed interpretation in 
Job and the Psalms which suggest this idea, there is 
good evidence for it all through the Old Testament, 
which is universally conceded by commentators, and 
was always claimed by the Jewish rabbis. The trans- 
lators have distinguished the revealed form of Deity, 
as successively recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, by 
the word LOKD, in capitals, separating this use of 
the word from other forms, as the preexistent Christ. 
" The angel of the Lord " and " the angel of Jehovah " 
are other expressions for the same manifestation of 
the Highest, which modern theology regards as the 
second person of the Trinity. Wherever God is said 
to have appeared as man, to Abraham at Mamre, to 
Jacob at Peniel, to Joshua at Gilgal, to the three 
captives in the Babylonian furnace as " a fourth, like 
to the Son of God," etc., Christian scholarship has 
maintained this to be the same person who afterward 
became the son of Mary. The Jews also consider 
these various appearances to be their promised Christ. 
After the captivity they held the same view concern- 
ing all persons. The apocryphal " Wisdom of Sol- 
omon " teaches unmistakably the preexistence of hu- 
man souls in Platonic form, although it probably is 
older than Philo, as when it says (ix. 15), " I was 
an ingenuous child, and received a good soul ; nay, 
more, being good, I came into a body undefiled ; " and 
" the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and 
the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that 
museth upon many things." Glimpses of it appear 
also in " Ecclesiasticus." 

The assertion of Josephus that this idea was com- 
mon among the Pharisees is proven in the Gospels, 
where members of the Sanhedrin cast the retort at 



218 REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 

Jesus, " Thou wast altogether born in sins." l The 
prevalence of this feeling in the judgments of daily 
life is seen in the question put to Jesus by his disci- 
ples, " Which did sin, this man or his parents, that he 
was born blind ? " 2 referring to the two contending 
popular theories, that of Moses, who taught that the 
sins of the fathers would descend on the children to 
the third and fourth generation, and that of reincarna- 
tion, subsequently adopted, by which a man's discom- 
forts resulted from his former misconduct. Jesus' 
reply, " Neither," is no denial of the truth of reincar- 
nation, for in other passages he definitely affirms it of 
himself, but merely an indication that he thought this 
truth had better not be given those listeners then, 
just as he withheld other verities until the ripe time 
for utterance. This very expression of preexistence 
used by the disciples he employs toward the man 
whom he healed at Bethesda's pool after thirty-eight 
years of paralysis : " Sin no more, lest a worse thing 
come unto thee." 3 Repeatedly he confirms the pop- 
ular impression that John the Baptist was a reincar- 
nation of Elijah. To the throng around him he said : 
" Among them that are born of women there hath 
not risen a greater than John the Baptist." M If ye 
will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come." 4 
That John the Baptist denied his former personality 
as Elijah is not strange, for no one remembers dis- 
tinctly his earlier life. Often Jesus refers to his 
descent from heaven, as when he says, " I came down 
from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of 
him that sent me ; " 5 and what he means by heaven 

1 John ix. 34. 2 John ix. 2, 3 John v. 14. 

4 Matt. xi. 14 ; also, Matt. xvii. 12, 13, See Professor Bowen's 
remarks upon these texts, page 114,, 
& John vi. 38. 



REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 219 

is shown by his words to Nicodernus, " No man hath 
ascended up to heaven but he that came down from 
heaven, even the Son of man which is In heaven." x 
The inference is that the heaven in which he for- 
merly lived was similar to the heaven of that mo- 
ment, namely earth. Again, Jesus asked his disciples, 
" Whom say men that lam?" And his disciples state 
the popular thought in answering, " Some say Elijah, 
others Jeremiah, and others one of the old prophets." 
" But whom say ye that lam?" Peter, the spokes- 
man, replies, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of God," 
and so expresses another phase of the same prevailing 
idea, for the Christ was also an Old Testament per- 
sonage. And Jesus approves this response. After 
Herod had decapitated John the Baptist, the appear- 
ance of Jesus, also preaching and baptizing, roused in 
him the apprehension that the prophet he killed had 
come again in a second life. 

Preexistence, the premise necessarily leading to 
reincarnation, is the keynote of the most spiritual of 
the Gospels. The initial sentence sounds it, the body 
of the book often repeats it, and the final climax is 
strengthened by it. From the proem, " In the be- 
ginning was the word, and the word was with God," 
all through the story occur frequent allusions to it : 
" The word was made flesh " (John i. 14) ; " I am the 
living bread which came down from Heaven " (vi. 
51) ; " Ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where 
he was before " (vi. 62) ; " Before Abraham was, I 
am " (viii. 58) ; and finally, " Glorify thou me with 
the glory which I had with thee before the world was " 
(xvii. 5) ; " For thou lovedst me before the founda- 
tion of the world" (xvii. 24). It is always phrased 
1 John iii. 13. 



220 REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 

in such a form as might be asserted by any one, though 
the speaker says it only of himself. 

What the fourth Gospel dwells upon so fondly, and 
what is echoed in other New Testament books, — as 
in Philippians ii. 7, " He took on him the form of a 
servant," in 2 Cor. viii. 9, " Though be was rich, yet 
for your sakes he became poor," and in 1 John i. 2, 
" That eternal Life which was with the Father, and 
was manifested unto us," — is a thought not limited to 
the Christ. Precisely the same occurs in the mention 
of the prophet-baptizer John : " There was a man sent 
from God" (John i. 6). The obvious sense of this 
verse to the Christians nearest its publication appears 
in the comments upon it by Origen, who says that it 
implies the existence of John the Baptist's soul pre- 
vious to his terrestrial body, and hints at the universal 
belief in preexistence by adding, " And if the Catholic 
opinion hold good concerning the soul, as not propa- 
gated w T ith the body, but existing previously and for 
various reasons clothed in flesh and blood, this ex- 
pression, ' sent from God,' will no longer seem ex- 
traordinary as applied to John." No words could 
more exactly suit the aspirations of an oriental believer 
in reincarnation than these in the Apocalypse : " Him 
that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of 
my God, and he shall go no more out " (Rev. iii. 
12). 

More important than any separate quotations is the 
general tone of the Scriptures, which points directly 
toward reincarnation. They represent the earthly 
life as a pilgrimage to the heavenly country of spirit- 
ual union with God. It is our conceit and ignorance 
alone which deems a single earthly life sufficient to ac- 
complish that purpose. They teach the sinful nature 



REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE. 221 

of all men and their responsibility for their sin, which 
certainly demands previous lives for the acquisition of 
that condition, as shown well by Chevalier Ramsay. 
(See pages 83-87.) St. Paul's idea of the Fall and 
of God are precisely those of Philo and Origen. The 
Bible also treats Paradise as the ancient abode of 
man and his future home, which requires a series of 
reincarnations as the connecting chain. 



VIII. 



REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 



Our soul having lost its heavenly mansion came down into the 
earthly body as a strange place. — Philo. 

The soul leaving the body becomes that power which it has most 
developed. Let us fly, then, from here below, and rise to the intel- 
lectual world, that we may not fall into a purely sensible life, by al- 
lowing ourselves to follow sensible images ; or into a vegetative life, 
by abandoning ourselves to the pleasures of physical love and glut- 
tony : let us rise, I say, to the intellectual world, to intelligence, to 
God himself. — Plotinus. 

The order of things is regulated by the providential government of 
the whole world ; some powers falling down from a loftier position, 
others gradually sinking to earth : some falling voluntarily, others 
being cast down against their will : some undertaking of their own 
accord the service of stretching out the hand to those who fall, others 
being compelled to persevere for a long time in the duty which they 
have undertaken. — Jerome. 

All that flesh doth cover 

Souls by source sublime 
Are but slaves sold over 

To the master Time, 
To work out their ransom 

For the ancient crime. 



VIII. 

REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 

The first centuries of Christianity found reincarna- 
tion still the prevailing creed, as in all the previous 
ages, but with various shades of interpretation. What 
these different phases of the same central thought 
were may be gathered from Jerome's catalogue, after 
the strife between Eastern and Western ideas had been 
working for some centuries and the present tendency 
of Europe had asserted itself. Jerome writes : u As to 
the origin of the soul, I remember the question of the 
whole church : whether it be fallen from heaven, as 
Pythagoras and the Platonists and Origen believe ; or 
be of the proper substance of God, as the Stoics, Mani- 
chseans and Priscillian heretics of Spain believe ; or 
whether they are kept in a repository formerly built 
by God, as some ecclesiastics foolishly believe; or 
whether they are daily made by God and sent into 
bodies according to that which is written in the Gospel : 
1 My Father worketh hitherto and I work ; ' or whether 
by traduction, as Tertullian, Apollinarius, and the 
greater part of the Westerns believe, i. e., that as body 
from body so the soul is derived from the soul, subsist- 
ing by the same condition with animals." 

In the form of Gnosticism it so strongly pervaded 
the early church that the fourth Gospel was specially 



226 IN EARLY CHRIS TEND OM. 

directed against it ; but this Gospel according to John 
attacked it only by advocating a broader rendering of 
the same faith. We have seen that Origen refers to 
preexistence as the general opinion. Clemens Alex- 
andrinus (Origen's master) taught it as a divine tradi- 
tion authorized by St. Paul himself in Eomans v. 12, 
14, 19. Ruffinus in his letter to Anastasius says that 
" This opinion was common among the primitive fa- 
thers." Later, Jerome relates that the doctrine of 
transmigration was taught as an esoteric one commu- 
nicated to only a select few. But Nemesius emphati- 
cally declared that all the Greeks who believed in im- 
mortality believed also in metempsychosis. Delitzsch 
says, " It had its advocates as well in the synagogues 
as in the church." 

The Gnostics and Manichseans received it, with 
much else, from Zoroastrian predecessors. The Neo- 
Platonists derived it chiefly from a blending of Plato 
and the Orient. The Church Fathers drew it not only 
from these sources, but from the Jews and the pioneers 
of Christianity. Several of them condemn the Persian 
and Platonic philosophies and yet hold to reincarna- 
tion in other guises. Aside from all authority, the 
doctrine seems to have been rooted among the inaugu- 
rators of our era in its adaptation to their mental 
needs, as the best explanation of the ways of God and 
the nature of men. 

I. The Gnostics were a school of eclectics which be- 
came conspicuous amid the chaotic vortex of all reli- 
gions in Alexandria, during the first century. They 
sought to furnish the young Christian church with a 
philosophic creed, and ranked themselves as the only 
initiates into a mystical system of Christian truth 
which was too exalted for the masses. Their thought 



IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM, 227 

was an elaborate structure of Greek ideas built upon 
Parsee Dualism, maintaining that the world was cre- 
ated by some fallen spirit or principle, and that the 
spirits of men were enticed from a preexistent higher 
stage by the Creator into the slavery of material bodies. 
The evils and sins of life belong only to the degraded 
prison-house of the spirit. The world is only an ob- 
ject of contempt. Virtue consists in severest asceti- 
cism. To combat their theory that Jesus was one 
of a vast number of beings between man and God, 
the fourth Gospel was written. They spread widely 
through the first and second centuries in many 
branches of belief. But most of their strength was 
absorbed into Manichaeism, which was a more logical 
union of Persian with Christian and Greek ideas. In 
this simple faith the world is a creation not of a fallen 
spirit, but of the primary evil principle, while the 
spirit of man is the creation of God, and the conflict 
between flesh and spirit is that between the powers of 
light and darkness. The Gnostic and Manichaean 
notions of preexistence perpetuated themselves in 
many of the medieval sects, especially the Bogomiles, 
Paulicians, and Priscillians. Seven adherents of the 
Priscillian heresy were put to death in Spain a. d. 385, 
as the first instance of the death penalty visited by a 
Christian magistrate for erroneous belief. The Ital- 
ian Cathari were another sect holding this form of re- 
incarnation, against whom the Albigensian Crusade of 
the elder De Montfort was sent, and the inquisition 
devised by St. Dominic. Still they thrived in secret 
and possessed a disguised hierarchy which long sur- 
vived their violent persecution. Similar sects de- 
scended from them still exist among the Russian dis- 
senters. 



228 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 

II. Contemporary with the Alexandrian Gnostics 
arose the philosophical school of the Neo-Platonists 
which gathered into one the doctrines of Pythagoras, 
Plato, and Buddhism, 1 and constructed a theology which 
might make headway against Christianity by satisfying 
in a rational way the longings which the new religion 
addressed. They too disclosed the reality and near- 
ness of a spiritual world, a reconciliation with God, 
and the pathway for returning to Him. The distin- 
guishing principle of Neo-Platonism is emanation, 
which took the place of creation. From the eternal 
Intelligence proceeds the multiplicity of souls which 
comprise the intelligible world, and of which the world- 
soul is the highest and all-embracing source. They 
insisted upon the distinct individuality of each soul, 
and earnestly combated the charge of Pantheism. 
Souls who have descended into the delusion of matter 
did so from pride and a desire of false independence. 
They now forget their former estate and the Father 
whom they have deserted. The mission of men, in 
the dying wx>rds of Plotinus, is " to bring the divine 
within them into harmony with that which is divine 
in the universe." The Neo-Platonists fought Gnosti- 
cism as fiercely as Christianity. Plotinus, by far the 
best of their writers, as well as the oldest whose works 
are preserved, devotes a whole book of his Enneads 
to the refutation of the doctrines of Valentin us, the 
brightest of the Gnostics. Contrary to the latter's 
thought, that men are fallen into the miry pit of mat- 
ter which is wholly bad, Plotinus claims that the 
world of matter, although the least divine part of the 
universe because remotest from the One, is still good 
and the best place for man's development. From its 
former life he insists the soul has not fallen and can- 

1 The close parallelism between Buddhism and Platonisni 
peculiarly facilitated this, 






IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 229 

not, but has descended into the lower stage of exist- 
ence through innate weakness of intellect in order to 
be prepared for a higher exaltation. 

The most important of this group of thinkers were 
Ammonius Saceas, Plotinus, and Porphyry in the 
third century, Jamblichus in the fourth, Hierocles and 
Proclus in the fifth, and Damascius in the sixth. It 
flourished with energy for over three hundred years, 
and as its ideas were largely appropriated by Chris- 
tian theologians and philosophers, beginning with 
Origen, it has never ceased to be felt through Chris- 
tendom. Giordano Bruno, the martyr of the Italian 
reformation, popularized it, and handed it over to 
later philosophers. The philosophy of Emerson is 
substantially a revival of Plotinus. Coleridge is also 
strongly influenced by him. 

As Plotinus is in some respects the most interesting 
of all the older writers, and taught reincarnation in 
a form thoroughly rational and supremely helpful, 
meeting Western needs in this regard more directly 
than any other philosopher, we quote at some length 
from his scarce essay on " The Descent of the Soul." 

"When any particular soul acts in discord from the 
One, flying from the whole and apostasizing from 
thence by a certain disagreement, no longer beholding 
an intelligible nature, from its partial blindness, in 
this case it becomes deserted and solitary, impotent 
and distracted with care ; for it now directs its men- 
tal eye to a part, and by a separation from that which 
is universal, attaches itself as a slave to one particular 
nature. It thus degenerates from the whole and gov- 
erns particulars with anxiety and fatigue, assiduously 
cultivating externals and becoming not only present 
with body, but profoundly entering into its dark 



230 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 

abodes. Hence, too, by such conduct the wings of the 
soul are said .to suffer a defluxion and she becomes 
fettered with the bonds of body, after deserting the 
safe and innoxious habit of governing a better nature 
which flourishes with universal soul. The soul, there- 
fore, falling from on high, suffers captivity, is loaded 
with fetters, and employs the energies of sense; be- 
cause in this case her intellectual longing is impeded 
from the first. She is reported also to be buried and 
to be concealed in a cave ; but when she converts her- 
self to intelligence she then breaks her fetters and as- 
cends on high, receiving first of all from reminiscence 
the ability of contemplating real beings ; at the same 
time possessing something supereminent and ever 
abiding in the intelligible world. Souls therefore are 
necessarily of an amphibious nature, and alternately 
experience a superior and inferior condition of being; 
such as are able to enjoy a more intimate converse 
with Intellect abiding for a longer period in the higher 
world, and such to whom the contrary happens, either 
through nature or fortune, continuing longer connected 
with these inferior concerns." .... 

" Thus, the soul, though of divine origin, and pro- 
ceeding from the regions on high, becomes merged in 
the dark receptacle of the body, and being naturally 
a posterior god, it descends hither through a certain 
voluntary inclination, for the sake of power and of 
adorning inferior concerns. By this means it receives 
a knowledge of its latent powers, and exhibits a vari- 
ety of operations peculiar to its nature, which by per- 
petually abiding in an incorporeal habit, and never 
proceeding into energy, would have been bestowed in 
vain. Besides the soul would have been ignorant of 
what she possessed, her powers always remaining dor« 






IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 231 

mant and concealed : since energy everywhere exhibits 
capacity, which would otherwise be entirely occult and 
obscure, and without existence, because not endued 
with one substantial and true. But now indeed every 
one admires the intellectual powers of the soul, through 
the variety of her external effects." .... 

" Through an abundance of desire the soul becomes 
profoundly merged into matter, and no longer totally 
abides with the universal soul. Yet our souls are 
able alternately to rise from hence carrying back with 
them an experience of what they have known and suf- 
fered in their fallen state ; from whence they will 
learn how blessed it is to abide in the intelligible 
world, and by a comparison, as it were, of contraries, 
will more plainly perceive the excellence of a superior 
state. For the experience of evil produces a clearer 
knowledge of good. This is accomplished in our souls 
according to the circulations of time, in which a con- 
version takes place from subordinate to more exalted 
natures. 

" Indeed, if it were proper to speak clearly what 
appears to me to be the truth, contrary to the opin- 
ions of others, the whole of our soul also does not en- 
ter into the body, but something belonging to it al- 
ways abides in the intelligible, and something different 
from this in the sensible world : and that which abides 
in the sensible world, if it conquers, or rather if it is 
vanquished and disturbed, does not permit us to per- 
ceive that which the supreme part of the soul contem- 
plates ; for that which is understood then arrives at 
our nature when it descends within the limits of sen- 
sible inspection. For every soul possesses something 
which inclines downwards to body, and something 
which tends upwards toward intellect ; and the soul, 



232 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 

indeed, which is universal and of the universe, by its 
part which is inclined towards body, governs the 
whole without labor and fatigue, transcending that 
which it governs. 

" But souls which are particular and of a part are 
too much occupied by sense, and by a perception of 
many things happening contrary to nature are sur- 
rounded by a multitude of foreign concerns. It is 
likewise subject to a variety of affections, and is en- 
snared by the allurements of pleasure. But the supe- 
rior part of the soul is never influenced by fraudulent 
delights, and lives a life always uniform and divine." 

III. Many of the orthodox Church Fathers wel- 
comed reincarnation as a ready explanation of the fall 
of man and the mystery of life, and distinctly preached 
it as the only means of reconciling the existence of 
suffering with a merciful God. It was an essential 
part of the church philosophy for many centuries in 
the rank and file of Christian thought, being stamped 
with the authority of the leading thinkers of Christen- 
dom, and then gradually was frowned upon as the 
Western influences predominated, until it became 
heresy and at length survived only in a few scattered 
sects. 

Justin Martyr expressly speaks of the soul inhabit- 
ing more than once the human body, and denies that 
on taking a second time the embodied form it can re- 
member previous experiences. Afterwards, he says, 
souls which have become unworthy to see God in hu- 
man guise, are joined to the bodies of wild beasts. 
Thus he openly defends the grosser phase of metemp- 
sychosis. 

Clemens Alexandrinus is declared by a contemporary 
to have written " wonderful stories about metemp- 
sychosis and many worlds before Adam." 



M EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 233 

Arnobius, also, is known to have frankly avowed 
this doctrine. 

Noblest of all the church advocates of this opinion 
was Origen. He regarded the earthly history of the 
human race as one epoch in an historical series of 
changeful decay and restoration, extending backward 
and forward into aeons ; and our temporal human 
body as the place of purification for our spirits ex- 
iled from a happier existence on account of sin. He 
taught that souls were all originally created by God 
minds of the same kind and condition, that is of the 
same essence as the infinite Mind, and that they ex- 
ercised their freedom of will, some wisely and well, 
others with abuse in different degrees, producing the 
divergences now apparent in mankind. From that 
old experience some souls have retained more than 
others of the pristine condition. The lapsed souls God 
clothed with bodies and sent into this world, both to 
expiate their temerity and to prepare themselves for a 
better future. The variety of their offenses caused 
the diversity of their terrestrial conditions. In these 
bodies, each enjoys that lot which most exactly suited 
his previous habits. On these the whole earthly cir- 
cumstances of man, internal and external, even his 
whole life from birth, depend. In this way alone he 
thought the justice of God could be defended. But 
when men keep themselves free from contagion in 
bodily existence and restrain the turbulent movements 
of sense and imagination, being gradually purified 
from the body they ascend on high and are at last 
changed into minds, of which the earthly souls are 
corruptions. In his own words, " Here is the cause 
of the di versing among rational creatures, not in the 
will or decision of the creature, but in the freedom of 



234 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 

individual liberty. For God justly disposing of his 
creatures according to their desert united the diver- 
sities of minds in one congruous world, that he might, 
as it were, adorn his mansion (in which ought to be 
not only vases of gold and silver, but of wood also and 
clay, and some to honor and some to dishonor) with 
these diverse vases, minds, or souls. To these causes 
the world owes its diversity, while Divine Providence 
disposes each according to his tendency, mind, and dis- 
position." 

" If from unknown reasons the soul be already not 
exactly worthy of being born in an irrational body, 
nor yet exactly in one purely rational, it is furnished 
with a monstrous body, so that reason cannot be 
fully developed by one thus born, the nature of the 
body being fashioned either of a higher or lower body 
according to the scope of the reason." 

" I think this is a question how it happens that the 
human mind is influenced now by the good now by 
the evil. The causes of this I suspect to be more an- 
cient than this corporeal birth." 

" If our course be not marked out according to our 
works before this life, how is it true that it is not un- 
just in God that the elder should serve the younger 
and be hated, before he had done things deserving of 
servitude and of hatred." 

" By the fall and by the cooling from a life of the 
Spirit came that which is now the soul, which is also 
capable of a return to her original condition, of which 
I think the prophet speaks in this : ' Return unto thy 
rest, O my soul.' So that the whole is this — how 
the mind becomes a soul and how the soul rectified 
becomes a mind." 

Concerning preexistence in the Bible, Origen writes, 



IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 235 

in his " De Principiis " : " The Holy Scriptures have 
called the creation of the world by a new and peculiar 
name, terming it KarapoXrj^ which has been very im- 
properly translated into Latin by ; constitutio ' ; for in 
Greek Kara/SoXy signifies rather 'dejicere,' i. e., to cast 
downwards, — a word which has been improperly trans- 
lated into Latin by the phrase ' constitutio inundi,' as 
where the Saviour says, ' And there will be tribulation 
in those days, such as was not since the beginning of 
the world ; ' 1 in which passage KaTaftoXrj is rendered 
by beginning (constitutio). The Apostle also has em- 
ployed the language, saying, ' Who hath chosen us be- 
fore the foundation of the world ; ' 2 and this founda- 
tion he calls Karaf^oX^ to be understood in the same 
sense as before. It seems worth while, then, to in- 
quire what is meant by this new term ; and I am, in- 
deed, of the opinion that as the end and consummation 
of the saints will be in those (ages) which are not 
seen, and are eternal, we must conclude that rational 
creatures had also a similar beginning. And if they 
had a beginning such as the end for which they hope, 
they existed undoubtedly from the very beginning in 
those (ages) which are not seen, and are eternal. 
And if this is so, then there has been a descent from 
a higher to a lower condition, on the part not only of 
those souls who have deserved the change by the vari- 
ety of their movements, but also on that of those who, 
in order to serve the whole world, were brought down 
from those higher and invisible spheres to these lower 
and visible ones, although against their will. From 
this it follows that by the use of the word KarafioXrj, a 
descent from a higher to a lower condition, shared by 
all in common, would seem to be pointed out. The 
1 Matt. xxiv. 21. 2 Ephesians i. 4. 



236 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM, 

hope of freedom is entertained by the whole of crea- 
tion — of being liberated from the corruption of slav- 
ery — when the sons of God, who either fell away or 
were scattered abroad, shall be gathered into one, and 
when they shall have fulfilled their duties in this 
world.' ' 

Many contemporaneous and subsequent writers 
censured Origen for this opinion, but his doctrine was 
maintained by a large number of strong followers and 
independent thinkers. 

Even in Jerome and Augustine certain passages in- 
dicate that they held this theory in part. In his Epis- 
tle to Avitus, Jerome agrees with Origen as to the in- 
terpretation of the passage above mentioned by Origen, 
" Who hath chosen us before the foundation of the 
world." He says u a divine habitation, and a true 
rest above, I think, is to be understood, where rational 
creatures dwelt, and where, before their descent to a 
lower position, and removal from invisible to visible 
(worlds), and fall to earth, and need of gross bodies, 
they enjoyed a former blessedness. Whence God the 
Creator made for them bodies suitable to their humble 
position, and created this visible world and sent into 
the world ministers for their salvation." 

The Latin Fathers Nemesius, Synesius, and Hila- 
rius boldly defend preexistence, though taking excep- 
tion to Qrigen's form of it. Of Synesius, most famil- 
iar to English readers as the convent patriarch in 
" Hypatia," it is known that when the citizens of 
Ptolemais invited him to their bishopric, he declined 
that dignity for the reason that he cherished certain 
opinions which they might not approve, as after ma- 
ture reflection they had struck deep roots in his mind. 
Foremost among these he mentioned the doctrine of 






IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM, 237 

preexistence. Vestiges of this belief are discerned in 
his writings ; for example, in the Greek hymn para- 
phrased as follows : — 

Eternal Mind, thy seedling spark 

Through this thin vase of clay 
Athwart the waves of chaos dark 

Emits a timorous ray ! 

This mind-enfolding soul is sown 

Incarnate germ in earth. 
In pity, blessed Lord, then own 

What claims in Thee its birth. 

Far forth from Thee, Thou central fire, 

To earth's sad bondage cast, 
Let not the trembling spark expire, 

Absorb Thine own at last. 

Another of this group, Prudentius, entertained 
nearly the same idea as that of Origen concerning the 
soul's descent from higher seats to earth, as appears in 
one of his hymns : — 

O Saviour, bid my soul, thy trembling spouse, 

Return at last to Thee believing. 
Bind, bind anew those all unearthly vows 

She broke on high and wandered grieving. 

Although Origen' s teaching was condemned by the 
Council of Constantinople in 551, it permanently col- 
ored the stream of Christian theology, not only in many 
scholastics and medieval heterodoxies, but through all 
the later course of religious thought, in many isolated 
individuals and groups. 



IX. 

REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 



A man may travel from one end of the kingdom to the other 
without money, feeding and lodging as well as the people. 

A Missionary in Burmah. 

Buddhism has not deceived, and it has not persecuted. In this 
respect it can teach Christians a lesson. The unconditioned command, 
a Thou shalt not kill," which applies to all living creatures, has had 
great influence in softening the manners of the Monguls. This com- 
mand is connected with the doctrine of transmigration of souls, which 
is one of the essential doctrines of this system as well as of Brahman- 
ism. Buddhism also inculcates a positive humanity consisting of good 
actions. — James Freeman Clarke. 

He lived musing the woes of man, 
The ways of fate, the doctrines of the hooks, 
The secrets of the silence whence all come, 
The secrets of the gloom whereto all go, 
The life that lies between like that arch flung 
From cloud to cloud across the sky, which hath 
Mists for its masonry and vapory piers. 

The Light of Asia. 



IX. 

REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 

The religious philosophy of the Orient, like every- 
thing else there, remains now substantially the same as 
in ancient times. History cannot say when Brahman- 
ism did not flourish among the multitudes of India. 
Buddhism, the later Protestant phase of the old faith, 
which abolished its abuses of priesthood and caste and 
spread its reformation broadcast through Asia, did 
not alter the original teaching of re-birth, but rather 
confirmed and popularized the truth that has lain at 
the heart of India from remotest ages. Reincarnation 
is the sap-root of eastern religion and permeates the 
Veda scriptures. 

While it is claimed by the West that the religion of 
Sakya Muni is below that of Jesus, as inspiring an 
exalted selfishness in distinction to the generous sacri- 
fice taught by Christianity ; while it is true that the 
best Buddhists lead a passive, submissive life which 
made them easy spoil for conquering races and has 
not accomplished any result in civilization since the 
first ancient subjugation ; while Buddhism with its 
mortification and self-centred goodness is even more 
distasteful to the western race than the meditative 
dreamy asceticism of Brahmanism : it is equally cer- 
tain that these eastern religions are far more really 



242 REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 

lived by their followers than Christianity is with us 
it must be admitted that a spiritual selfishness, whicl 
is so thoroughly practiced as to bear all the fruits o 
generous love, is preferable to a noble sacrifice, which 
is so largely precept as to appear to the naked eye 
a civilized barbarism ; and it is worth considering 
whether Christendom may not gain as much by learn- 
ing the secret of Eastern superiority to materialism, 
as the Orient is gaining by the infusion of Western 
activity. Travelers agree that in many parts of inner 
China, Thibet, Central India, and Ceylon the daily life 
of Buddhism is so like the realization of Christianity, 
as to give strong support to the theory of the Indian 
origin of our religion. There is a practical demonstra- 
tion of what reincarnation will do for a race, and a 
hint of the grander result which would accrue from 
grafting that principle into the real life of the stronger 
Saxon, Teutonic, and Celtic stock. Knowing the inde- 
structibility of the soul, the evanescence of the body, 
and the permanence of spiritual traits as formed by 
thought, word, and deed, the whole energy of life is 
focused upon purity of self and charity to others. To 
love one's enemies, to abstain from even defensive 
warfare, to govern the soul, to obey one's superiors, to 
venerate age, to provide food and shelter, to tolerate 
all differences of opinion and religion, are guiding 
maxims of actual life. They are as vitally and gener- 
ally translated into flesh and blood as in primitive 
Christianity or in Count Tolstoi's flock. Honesty, 
modesty, and simplicity prevail in these sections. 
Women are held in the same esteem as in the ancient 
Sanskrit epoch, and children are treated more beauti- 
fully than in many Christian homes. A lady traveler, 
known to the writer, who witnessed this, said that if 



REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 243 

her lot were that of a friendless woman, she knew no 
place on earth where she would labor and dwell more 
happily than in Ceylon. As the peasantry receive re- 
incarnation in the simplest and extremest form of hu- 
man re-births in animal bodies, every living creature 
is regarded by them as a possible relative. Gentle- 
ness to the animal creation abounds as nowhere else 
in the world. It is a sin to kill any beast. It is a 
virtue to offer one's life for a distressed animal, as 
the popular tradition holds that Buddha did in one 
life by throwing himself to a famished tigress. Death 
is no object of dread, but a welcome benefactor, trans- 
ferring them forward in their progress to the goal of 
rest. To die for any good purpose, as under the sa- 
cred Brahman car of Juggernaut, or in some one's be- 
half, is the common aspiration ; so much so that it is 
difficult for the missionaries to gain any feeling for 
the death on the cross, as they think any one would 
easily suffer that. 

The Brahmans have for ages studied the problems 
of ontology and the soiri's future, by severest intro- 
spection and acutest thought, to build their system, 
which is a vast elaboration of religious metaphysics, 
upon a theistic basis. Reincarnation is the corner- 
stone of this structure. Many of the higher Brahmans 
are believed to have penetrated the veils concealing 
past existences. It is related, for instance, that when 
Apollonius of Tyana visited India, the Brahman 
Iarchus told him that " the truth concerning the soul 
is as Pythagoras taught you and as we taught the 
Egyptians," and mentioned that he (Apollonius) in a 
previous incarnation was an Egyptian steersman, and 
had refused the inducements offered him by pirates 
to guide his vessel into their hands. The common 



244 REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 

people of India are sure that certain of the Brahmans 
and Buddhists are still able to verify by their finer 
senses the reality of reincarnation. And many edu- 
cated natives and resident foreigners in India have 
witnessed evidences of this keen power of insight as- 
sociated with other extraordinary qualities which com- 
pelled them to believe in it. 

Brahmanism and Buddhism are practically agreed 
upon the philosophy of reincarnation, as the great 
Buddhist revolt against priestcraft only emphasized 
this doctrine. Every branch of these systems aims 
at the means of winning escape from the necessity of 
repeated births. The ardent and final desire of all 
is expressed by the words of the sage Bharata : — 

" And may the purple self-existent god (Siva), 
Whose vital energy pervades all space, 
From future transmigrations save my soul." 

There are, however, great differences in these two 
faiths as to the means and the result. Both contend 
that all forms are the penance of nature. They regard 
personal existence as an empty delusion and the ex- 
emption from it as true salvation. The Brahman 
seeks Nirvana, which is absorption in Brahm, as the 
reality at the heart of things; the Buddhist con- 
siders this also unreal, and finds no reality but in 
the silence and peace attained beyond Nirvana. In 
the Brahman's paradise, one is so free from desire 
that no need remains for perpetuating his individual 
existence. But after that comes Pan-Nirvana, which 
is utter inaction and disappearance, a condition so 
difficult for a Western mind to comprehend that it 
persists in falsely calling it and Nirvana alike — an- 
nihilation. The Buddhist's one duty of life and the 
means of attaining his goal is mortification, the ex- 



REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 245 

tinction of affection and desire. But the Brahman's 
work is contemplation, illumination, communion with 
Brahm, religious study, and asceticism. The creed 
of Buddhism is universal ; that of Brahmanism is 
exclusive. The Buddhist saint may come from any 
class, for the raison d'etre of his faith is the abolition 
of caste. But only the wearer of the sacred Brahman 
thread can aspire to direct union with Brahm ; the 
lower castes must undergo painful fakir penances 
until they attain the Brahman estate. 

Northern Buddhism has been defined as almost 
identical with Gnosticism. It has spun a dense fabric 
of legend and speculation about this central thought 
of the soul's gradual evolution from the natural to 
the spiritual. The Hindus believe that human souls 
emanated from the Supreme Being, and became grad- 
ually immersed in matter, forgetting their divine 
origin, and straying in bewildered condition back to 
him through many lives, after a protracted round of 
births in partial reparation. Having become con- 
taminated with sin, we must work out our release 
through earthly lives in the delusive arena of sense 
until the reality of spiritual existence is attained. 
So long as the soul is not pure enough for re-mer- 
gence into Brahm, we must be born again repeatedly, 
and the degree of our impurity determines what these 
births shall be. So closely is the account of the soul's 
misdeeds kept that it may pass through thousands of 
years in one or another of the heavens in reward for 
good deeds, and yet be obliged later to descend to earth 
for certain ancient sins. The Laws of Manu give a 
standard by which the moral consequences of various 
human actions are measured with great detail. 1 A 
1 See page 273. 



246 REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 

more general doctrine is based on the assumption of 
three Cosmic qualities — goodness, passion, and dark- 
ness — in the human soul. On this ground Manu and 
other writers built an intricate theory, providing that 
souls of the first quality become deities, those of the 
second, men, and those of the third, beasts. 

The Hindu conception of reincarnation embraces 
all existence — gods, men, animals, plants, minerals. 
It is believed that everything migrates, from Buddha 
down to inert matter. Hardy tells us that Buddha 
himself was born an ascetic eighty -three times, a mon- 
arch fifty-eight times, as the soul of a tree forty- 
three times, and many other times as ape, deer, lion, 
snipe, chicken, eagle, serpent, pig, frog, etc., amount- 
ing to four hundred times in all. A Chinese author- 
ity represents Buddha as saying, " The number of my 
births and deaths can only be compared to those of 
all the plants in the universe." Birth is the gate 
which opens into every state, and merit determines 
into which it shall open. Earth and human life are 
an intermediary stage, resulting from many previous 
places and forms and introducing many more. There 
are multitudes of inhabited worlds upon which the 
same person is successively born according to his at- 
tractions. To the earthly life he may return again 
and again, dropping the memory of past experiences, 
and carrying, like an embryonic germ, the concisest 
summary of former lives into each coming one. Every 
act bears upon the resultant which shall steer the soul 
into its next habitation, not only on earth, but in the 
more exalted or debased regions of " Heaven " and 
" Hell." Thus " the chain of the law" binds all ex- 
istences, and the only escape is by the final absorption 
into Brahm. 



REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 247 

While the Hindus generally hold that the same 
soul appears at different births, the heretical Southern 
Buddhists teach that the succession of existences is a 
succession of souls, bred from one another, like the 
sprouting of new generations from plants and animals, 
and like the new light kindled from an old lamp, the 
result, but not the identity of the former. Another 
curious aspect of these Indian speculations is the 
view of certain Northern Buddhists, who divide eter- 
nity into gigantic cycles which shall at length bring 
around again a precise repetition of earlier events. 
This is similar to the grand periodic year of the Stoics 
and of the Epicurean Atomists, and to the continual 
metempsychosis of Pythagoras, which provided that 
the identical Plato would again and again, at certain 
tremendous intervals staggering any one but a Greek 
or Hindu metaphysician, appear at the same Academy 
and deliver the same lectures, etc. 

Zoroastrians and Sufi Mohamedans, with their 
usual antipathy to Indian thought, limit their concep- 
tions of reincarnation to a few repeated lives on earth, 
which some of the Persian and Arabian mystics stretch 
out to a larger number, but soon disappearing either 
back into the original source or into darker scenes. 



EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 






Here shalt thou pluck from the most ancient shells 
The whitest pearls of wisdom's treasury. 

Edwin Arnold. 

Young* and enterprising is the West, 
Old and meditative is the East. 
Turn, youth ! with intellectual zest 
Where the sage invites thee to his feast. 

Eastward roll the orbs of heaven, 
Westward tend the thoughts of men. 
Let the poet, nature-driven, 
Wander eastward now and then. 

Milnes. 



X. 

EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 

All Eastern poetry finds a favorite theme in me- 
tempsychosis, and the literature of India is thoroughly 
saturated with it. The fervent passion, the subtle 
thought, the luxuriant imagery which permeate Asiatic 
life are centred upon this common philosophy. But 
the best portion of this enormous wealth of fantasy 
is withheld from us, simply because of its revelry in 
this very thought which is generally unattractive to 
the West. What oriental poetry enters our language 
is chiefly erotic or epic, and the most characteristic 
of all is left for the few educated natives to enjoy. 
We can therefore only select a few representative 
gems from this unworked mine, illustrating the Muses 
of India, Persia, and Arabia. Among the ancient 
Sanskrit epics are discovered beautiful renderings of 
the thought of many births. The delicacy and ten- 
derness of Persian poetry furnish charming expres- 
sions of the Zoroastrian aspirations for release from 
earthly bondages to reascend homeward. The Ara- 
bian mysticism of the Sufis directs their intense sub- 
jectivity into ecstatic phrasings of the same idea. 

In the wonderful ancient Sanskrit drama "Sa- 
koontala " by Kalidesa, translated by Monier Williams, 
occur these passages : — 



252 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 

This peerless maid is like a fragrant flower 

Whose perfumed breath has never been diffused. 

A gem of priceless water, just released 

Pure and unblemished from its glittering bed. 

Or rather is she like the mellowed fruit 

Of virtuous actions in some former birth 

Now brought to full perfection. 

That song has filled me with a most peculiar sweetness. 

I seem to yearn after some long forgotten love. 

Not seldom in our happy hours of ease 

When thought is still, the sight of some fair form, 

Or mournful fall of music breathing low 

Will stir strange fancies thrilling all the soul 

With a mysterious sadness and. a sense 

Of vague yet earnest longing. Can it be 

That the dim memory of events long passed, 

Or friendships formed in other states of being 

Flits like a passing shadow o'er the spirit ? 

The Sanskrit "Katha Upanishad," in Edwin Ar- 
nold's rendering as "The Secret of Death,'' contains 
a full explanation of the Eastern doctrine. 

For his noble sacrifice Yama (Death) grants to 
Nachiketas the privilege of asking three boons. Af- 
ter naming and receiving the first two NachikStas 
says : — 

"Thou dost give peace — is that peace nothingness ? 
Some say that after death the soul still lives, 
Personal, conscious ; some say, nay, it ends : 
Fain would I know which of these twain be true, 
By the enlightened. Be my third boon this." 
Then Yama answered, " This was asked of old, 
Even by the gods ! This is a subtle thing. 
Not to be told, hard to be understood : 
Ask me some other boon : I may not grant." 



EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 253 

Nachiketas insists upon this, and will not accept the 
wealths, powers, and pleasures which Death offers as 
a substitute. 

Then Yama yielded, granting the great boon, 

And spake : " Know, first of all, that what is Good 

And what is Pleasant — these be separate ! 

By many ways, in diverse instances 

Pleasure and Good lay hold upon each man ! 

Blessed is he who, choosing high, lets go 

Pleasure for Good. The Pleasure-seekers lose 

Life's end, so lived. The Pleasant and the Good 

Solicit men : the sage, distinguishing 

By understanding, followeth the Good, 

Being more excellent. The foolish man 

Cleaveth to Pleasure, seeking still to have, 

To keep, enjoy. The foolish ones who live 

In ignorance, holding themselves as wise 

And well instructed, tread the round of change 

With erring steps, deluded, like the blind 

Led by the blind. The necessary road 

Which brings to life unchanging is not seen 

By such : wealth dazzles heedless hearts : deceived 

With shows of sense, they deem their world is real 

And the unseen is naught ; so, constantly, 

Fall they beneath my stroke. To reach to Being 

Beyond all seeming Being, to know true life — 

This is not gained by many ; seeing that few 

So much as hear of it, and of those few 

The more part understandeth not. 

" The uttermost true soul is ill-perceived 
By him who, unenlightened, sayeth : I 
Am I : thou, thou ; and the life divided : He 
That knoweth life undifferenced, declares 
The spirit, what it is, One with the All. 
And this is Truth. But nowise shall the truth 
Be compassed, if thou speak of small and great. 



254 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 

" Excellent youth ! the knowledge thou didst crave 
Comes not with speech : words are the false world's signs, 
By insight surely comes it if one hears. 
Lo ! thou hast loved the Truth, and striven for it. 
I would that others, Nachiketas, strove ! 

" Only the wise who patiently do sever 
Their thought from shows and fix it upon truths, 
See HIM, the Perfect and Unspeakable, 
Hard to be seen, retreating, ever hid 
Deeper and dee23er in the uttermost ; 
Whose house was never entered, who abides 
Now and before and always ; and so seeing 
Are freed from griefs and pleasures." 

" Make it known to me," he saith, 
" Who is He ? what ? whom thou hast knowledge of." 

Then Yam a spake : 
" The answer whereunto all vedas lead ; 
The answer whereunto as penance strives ; 
The answer whereunto those strive that live 
As seekers after God — hear this from me. 
Who knoweth the word Om (which meaneth God) 
With all its purports ; what his heart would have 
His heart possesseth. This of spoken speech 
Is wisest, deepest, best, supremest. He 
That speaketh it, and wotteth what he speaks 
Is worshiped in the place of Brahm, with Brahm ! 
Also, the soul which knoweth thus itself 
It is not born. It doth not die. It sprang 
From none, and it begetteth none. Unmade, 
Immortal, changeless, primal. I can break • 
The body, but that soul I cannot harm. ,, 

" If he that slayeth thinks ' I slay ' ; if he 
Whom he doth slay thinks ' I am slain/ then both 
Know not aright. That which was life in each 
Cannot be slain nor slay. The untouched soul, 
Greater than all the worlds (because the worlds 
By it subsist) ; smaller than subtleties 



EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 255 

Of things minutest ; last of ultimates, 

Sits in the hollow heart of all that lives ! 

Whoso hath laid aside desire and fear, 

His senses mastered and his spirit still, 

Sees in the quiet light of verity 

Eternal, safe, majestical — his soul : 

Resting it ranges everywhere : asleep 

It roams the world, unsleeping : who, save I, 

Know that divinest spirit as it is, 

Glad beyond joy, existing outside life ? 

Beholding it in bodies bodiless, 

Amid impermanency permanent, 

Embracing all things, yet in the midst of all 

The mind enlightened casts its grief away : 

It is not to be known by knowledge : man 

Wotteth it not by wisdom : learning vast 

Halts short of it : only by soul itself 

Is soul perceived — when the Soul wills it so 

There shines no light save its own light to show 

Itself unto itself : none compasseth 

Its joy who is not wholly ceased from sin, 

Who dwells not self-controlled, self-centred, calm, 

Lord of himself. It is not gotten else. 

Brahm hath it not to give. 

u The man unwise, unmindful, evil-lived 
Comes not to that fixed place of peace ; he falls 
Back to the region of sense life again. 
The wise and mindful one, heart purified, 
Attaineth to the changeless Place, wherefrom 
Never again shall births renew for him. 
Then hath he freedom over all worlds 
And, if it wills the region of the Past, 
The fathers and the mothers of the Past 
Come to receive it ; and that soul is glad : 
And if it wills the regions of the Homes, 
The Brothers and the Sisters of the Homes 



256 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 

Come to receive it ; and that soul is glad : 
And if it wills the region of the Friends, 
The well-beloved come to welcome it 
With love undying ; and that soul is glad. 
And if it wills a world of grace and peace 
Where garlands are and perfumes and delights 
Of delicate meats and drinks, music and song, 
Lo ! fragrances and blossoms and delights 
Of dainty banquets and the streams of song 
Come to it ; and that soul is glad. 
Whoso once perceiveth Him that is 
Without a name, Unseen, Impalpable, 
Bodiless, Timeless, such an one is saved, 
Death hath not power upon him. ,, 

Although not an Asiatic poem in the ordinary 
sense, we do not hesitate to place in this cluster Edwin 
Arnold's " Light of Asia." After the festival scene 
in which the prince distributed prizes to the maiden 
victors in the sports, and his love had centred upon 
Yasodhara, the last of the contestants, follow these 
lines : — 

Long after, when enlightenment was full, 
Lord Buddha, being prayed why thus his heart 
Took fire at first glance of the Sakya girl, 
Answered : " We were not strangers as to us 
And all it seemed ; in ages long gone by 
A hunter's son, playing with forest girls 
By Yamun's springs, where Nandadevi stands 
Sate umpire while they raced beneath the firs 
Like hares at eve that run their playful rings ; 
One with flower-like stars crowned he, one with long plumes, 
Plucked from the pheasant and the jungle cock, 
One with fir apples ; but who ran the last 
Came first for him, and unto her the boy 



EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 257 

Gave a tame fawn and his heart's love beside. 

And in the wood they lived many glad years, 

And in the wood they undivided died. 

Lo ! as hid seed shoots after rainless years, 

So good and evil, pains and pleasures, hates 

And loves, and all dead deeds come forth again 

Bearing bright leaves or dark, sweet fruit or sour. 

Thus was I he and she Yasodhara ; 

And while the wheel of birth and death turns round 

That which hath been must be between us two." 

In other passages of the same poem Buddha tells 
how his athletic triumph over the suitors for Yaso- 
dhara, in which she wore a black and gold veil, was but 
a new version of an ancient forest battle, when as a 
tiger he conquered all the rival claimants for the 
black and gold-striped tigress Yasodhara; how ages 
before in time of famine, when he was a Brahman, he 
compassionately threw himself to a starving tigress ; 
and how his final salvation of Yasodhara by the en- 
lightened doctrine repeated a transaction centuries 
old, when he was a pearl merchant and sacrificed the 
priceless gem containing all his fortune to rescue this 
same wife Yasodhara from hunger, 

A typical expression of the Zoroastrian phase of 
reincarnation is found in this poem : — 

FROM THE PERSIAN. 

BY ARCHBISHOP R. C. TRENCH. 

Happy are you, starry brethren, who from heaven do not 

roam, 
In the eternal Father's mansion from the first have dwelt 

at home. 



258 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 

Round the Father's throne forever standing in his coun- 
tenance, 

Sunning you, you see the seven circling heavens around you 
dance. 

Me he has cast out to exile in a distant land to learn 
How I should love Him the Father, how for that true coun- 
try yearn. 

I lie here, a star of heaven, fallen upon this gloomy place, 
Scarce remembering what bright courses I was once allowed 
to trace. 

Still in dreams it comes upon me, that I once on wings did 

soar; 
But or e'er my flight commences this my dream must all be 

o'er. 

When the lark is climbing upward in the sunbeam, then I feel 
Even as though my spirit also hidden pinions could reveal. 

I a rosebud to this lower soil of earth am fastly bound, 
And with heavenly dew besprinkled still am rooted to the 
ground. 

Yet the life is struggling upward, stirring still with all their 

might, 
Yearning buds that cry to open to the warmth and heavenly 

light. 

From its stalk released, my flower soars not yet a but- 
terfly, 

But meanwhile my fragrant incense evermore I breathe on 
high. 

By my Gardener to his garden I shall once transplanted be ? 
There where I have been already written from eternity. 



EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION, 259 

Oh, my brothers blooming yonder, unto Him the ancient — 

pray 
That the hour of my transplanting He will not for long 

delay. 

Hafiz, the prince of Persian poets, figures the soul 
as the phoenix alighting on Tuba, the Tree of Life : — 

My phoenix long ago secured 

His nest in the sky-vault's cope ; 
In the body's cage immured 

He was weary of life's hope. 

Round and round this heap of ashes 

Now flies the bird amain, 
But in that odorous niche of heaven 

Nestles the bird again. 

Once flies he upward he will perch 

On Tuba's golden bough ; 
His home is on that fruited arch 

Which cools the blest below. 

If over this sad world of ours 

His wings my phoenix spread, 
How gracious falls on land and sea 

The soul-refreshing shade ! 

Either world inhabits he, 

Sees oft below him planets roll ; 
His body is all of air compact, 

Of Allah's love, his soul. 

The following Sufi poem will illustrate the passion- 
ate phase of reincarnation which appears in the spirit- 
ual absorption of the Mohammedan mystics. It is 



260 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 

not surprising that the intensity of their rapturous pi- 
ety has drawn among their ranks of meditative devo- 
tees the most distinguished religionists, philosophers, 
and poets of the whole Persian and Arabian Orient : 



THE SUCCESSFUL SEARCH. 

I was ere a name had been named upon earth, — 

Ere one trace yet existed of aught that has birth, — 

When the locks of the Loved One streamed forth for a sign, 

And being was none save the Presence Divine ! 

Ere the veil of the flesh for Messiah was wrought 

To the Godhead I bowed in prostration of thought. 

I measured intensely, I pondered with heed 

(But ah ! fruitless my labor) the Cross and its creed. 

To the Pagod I rushed, and the Magian's shrine, 

But my eye caught no glimpse of a glory divine : 

The reins of research to the Caaba I bent, 

Whither hopefully thronging the old and young went ; 

Candasai and Her^t searched I wistfully through, 

Nor above nor beneath came the Loved One to view ! 

I toiled to the summit, wild, pathless and lone, 

Of the globe-girding Kaf, but the Phcenix had flown. 

The seventh earth I traversed, the seventh heaven explored, 

But in neither discerned I the Court of the Lord. 

I questioned the Pen and the Tablet of Fate, 

But they whispered not where He pavilions his state. 

My vision I strained, but my God- scanning eye 

No trace that to Godhead belongs could descry. 

But when I my glance turned within my own breast, 

Lo ! the vainly sought Loved One, the Godhead confessed. 

In the whirl of its transport my spirit was tossed 

Till each atom of separate being I lost : 

And the bright sun of Tanniz a madder than me 

Or a wilder, hath never yet seen, nor shall see. 



XI. 

ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 




J 



Life's thirst quenches itself 
With draughts which double thirst, but who is wise 
Tears from his soul this Trishna, feeds his sense 
No longer on false shows, files his mind 
To seek not, strive not, wrong not ; bearing meek 
All ills which flow from foregone wrongfulness, 
And so constraining passions that they die. 
Thus grows he sinless : either never more 
Needing to find a body and a place, 
Or so informing what freer frame it takes 
In new existence that the new toils prove 
Lighter and lighter not to be at all, 
Thus " finishing the path " ; free from earth's cheats ; 
Released from all the skandhas of the flesh ; 
Broken from ties — from Upadan — saved 
From whirling on the wheel ; aroused and sane 
As is a man wakened from hateful dreams. 
Till aching craze to live ends, and life glides 
Lifeless — to nameless quiet, nameless joy, 
Blessed Nirvana — sinless, stirless rest — 
That change which never changes. 

The Light of Asia. 



V 



XL 

ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 

Throughout the East to-day, as in all past time, 
the higher priesthood controls a spiritual science which 
has been accumulated by long ages of severest study, 
and is concealed from the vulgar world. This is no 
mere elaboration of fanciful philosophy, as is much of 
eastern metaphysics, patiently spun from secluded 
speculation like the mediaeval scholasticism of Europe. 
It is a purely rational development of psychology by 
the aid of scientific inquiry. Through protracted 
investigation and crucial tests repeatedly applied to 
actual experience and through retrospective and pro- 
phetic insight they have probed many of the secrets of 
the soul. The falsity of materialism and the all-com- 
manding power of spirit are proven beyond a cavil. 
How the soul is independent of the physical body, 
sometimes leaving and returning to it, and moulding 
it to suit its needs ; how all nature is but a vast family 
embodied in physical clothing and inextricably inter- 
laced in living brotherhood, from lowest atom to sub- 
limest archangel ; how the gradual evolution of all 
races proceeds through revolving cycles in a constantly 
ascending order of things ; — these and many other 
stupendous spiritual facts are to them familiarly 
known. These masters of human mystery hold them- 
selves apart from the populace and seldom appear to 



\ 



264 ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 

any but their special disciples, but they are universally 
believed in by the natives of India, as the miraculous 
evidences of their penetration into nature's heart 
have been seen of many. Moreover, ocular demonstra- 
tion of the existence and phenomenal capacities of 
these Mahatmas has frequently been given to well- 
known officials and reputable foreigners, whose testi- 
mony is on record. 

Although these highest adepts keep most of their 
discoveries secret, preferring to enlighten mankind in- 
directly and by a wholesome gradual uplifting, occa- 
sional expressions have been given of the occult phi- 
losophy derived from their funds of science, and from 
these we abridge what they are said to teach concern- 
ing reincarnation. Even in the books containing their 
doctrine, as " Man," " Esoteric Buddhism," " Light 
on the Path," and " Through the Gates of Gold," 1 we 
surmise that portions relating to specific details are 
more or less arbitrary and exoteric. Therefore we 
confine our attention to a synopsis of their central 
principles of the subject. 

These masters tell us that man is composed of seven 
principles intricately interwoven so as to constitute a 
unit and yet capable of partial separation. This sep- 
tenary division is only a finer analysis of the common 
triple distinctions, body, soul, and spirit, and runs 
through the entire universe. The development of 
man is in the order of these divisions, from body to 
spirit and from spirit to body, in a continual round of 
incarnations. The progress may be best illustrated 
by a seven-coiled spiral which sweeps with a wider 
curve at every ascent. The spiral is not a steady up- 
ward incline, but at one side sags down into material- 

1 Beside these recent English books the Appendix gives many 
older ones. 



ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 265 

ity and at the other side rises into spirituality, — the 
material portion of each ring being the lowest side of 
its curve, but always higher than the corresponding 
previous descent. Furthermore, each ring of the spiral 
is itself a seven-fold spiral, and each of these again is 
a seven-fold spiral, and so on to an indefinite number 
of subdivisions. 

The evolutionary process requires for its complete 
unf oldment a number of planets x corresponding to the 
seven principles. On each of these planets a long series 
of lives is necessary before one can advance to the next. 
After a full circuit is made the course must be re- 
peated again on a higher plane, until many successive 
series of the planetary rotations, each involving hun- 
dreds of separate lives, has developed the individual 
into the perfect fullness of experience. Some of these 
planets are unknown to astronomy, being of too fine a 
materiality for our present perceptions, and on them 
man is very unlike his terrestrial appearance. 

Since the first human souls began their career 
through these cycles they have moved along the en- 
tire planetary chain three times, and now, for the 
fourth time, we have reached the fourth planet — Earth. 

1 In the explicit phrasing from which this section is derived, 
there are mentioned seven planets, through each of which the soul 
makes seven rounds, each round including seven races, and each 
race seven sub-races, and these again containing seven branches, 
multiplying the whole number of lives into a compound of seven. 
Everywhere the sacred number appears, but contrary to the 
strict interpretation of many students of oriental thought, we are 
certain that these figures are only symbols. Just as the spec- 
trum might be split into only three essential components, or into 
a much larger number than seven, so the dissection of these 
courses of the soul into any one number seems to be an arbitrary 
mathematical representation of the fact that each division must 
include such components as will fit together in one indissoluble 
entirety. 



266 ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 

We are therefore, roughly speaking, about half devel- 
oped, physically. During the previous series of earthly 
inhabitations we were exceedingly different from our 
present form, and during the later ones we shall enter 
upon still more marvelous stages. With each grand 
series (or round) a dimension is added to man's con- 
ception of space. The fourth dimension will be a 
common fact of consciousness before we complete the 
present set of earthly lives. Before reaching the per- 
fection attainable here at each round every soul must 
pass through many minor circuits. We are said to be 
in the middle of the fifth circuit (or race) of our 
fourth round, and the evolution of this fifth race began 
about a million years ago. Each race is subdivided, 
and each of these divisions again dissected, making 
the total number of lives allotted to each round very 
large. No human being can escape the earth's at- 
traction until these are accomplished, with only rare 
exceptions among those who by special merit have out- 
stripped the others : for although all began alike, the 
contrasted uses of the universal opportunities have 
produced all the variations now existing in the human 
race. The geometrical progression of characteristics 
selected by each soul has resulted in vast divergences. 

Long before the twilight of our birth into the pres- 
ent life we passed through an era of immense duration 
on this planet as spiritual beings, gradually descending 
into matter to enter the bodies which were developed 
up from the highest animal type for our reception. 
Our evolution therefore is a double one — on the spir- 
itual side from ethereal races of infinite pedigree, and 
on the physical side from the lower animals. 

In the first earthly circuit of the last great series 
(or round) we passed through seven ethereal sub-races. 



ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 267 

Each of these developed one astral sense, until the sev- 
enth sub-race had seven senses. What the sixth and 
seventh were we cannot imagine, but in time we shall 
know, as we are at present tracing over again that 
path more perfectly, and have reached only the fifth of 
the seven stages on this circuit. The first of these 
seven sub-races slowly acquired the sense of physical 
sight. All the other parts of the sensuous nature 
were in shadowy latency. They had no notion of dis- 
tance, solidity, sound, or smell. Even colors were hid- 
den from the earliest men, all being white at first. 
Each incarnation in this race developed more of the 
prismatic hues in their rainbow order, beginning with 
red. But the one sense of sight was so spiritual that 
it amounted to clairvoyancy. The second sub-race in- 
herited sight and developed newly touch. Through 
the repeated lives in this rank the sense of feeling be- 
came wonderfully delicate and acute, possessing the 
psychometric quality and revealing the inner as well 
as the outer nature of the things to which it was ap- 
plied. The third sub-race attained hearing, and its 
spiritual development of this sense was so keen that 
the most subtle sounds, as the budding leaf and the 
motion of the heavenly bodies, was clearly perceived. 
The fourth sub-race added smell to the other three 
senses, and the fifth entered into taste. The sixth and 
seventh unfolded the remaining senses, which are be- 
yond our present ken. 

In the second circuit (or race) the soul began once 
more with a single sense and passed through another 
course of sub-races, rehearsing the scale of the senses 
with a larger control of them, though less spiritual. 
But even in the third circuit the repeated unf oldments 
of the senses toward their physical destiny had still 



268 ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 

retained a large degree of spiritual quality, as the men 
themselves were still ethereal. 

Our first terrestrial appearance in the present cir- 
cuit (the fifth race) was in spiritual form, having only- 
astral bodies. This primitive ethereal race occupied 
the earth long before it was geologically prepared for 
the historical human races. The development of the 
physical senses in their present form marks the stages 
of our reincarnation in the present race, which is called 
the descent into matter. Each turn in this circuit 
has carried forward the evolution of the senses in a 
fixed order, until now we have a firmer hold than 
ever before upon those five which indicate the extent 
of our progress in the present stage. Our repeated 
re-births have obscured the long vista of the ages 
through which we have traveled to this point, run- 
ning through the seven-toned gamut over and over 
again, first in broad rough outline, then finishing the 
details more carefully at each iteration. Their early 
spiritual forms have gradually given way to the mod- 
ern physical forms, but some persons still retain a por- 
tion of those old guises that once were universal, in 
certain peculiarly delicate senses known as second 
sight, psychometry, clairaudence, tasting through the 
fingers, and smelling like a hound. In our present 
era the sense of taste has become the last and most 
fully developed and the characteristic sense. At first 
the body did not require food ; then becoming grosser 
it inhaled it with the air, and as the condition ap- 
proached which now prevails, man became an eating 
animal and is grown to an epicure. When we shall 
have completed the full number of rounds on this 
earth we shall have not only the other two senses, but 
shall govern all seven in a triple form as physical, 
astral, and spiritual. 



ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 269 

The most important fact in our evolution, and the 
cause of the present phase of existence, with its blind- 
ing encasements of matter and evil, is the growth of 
a personal will. This is the forbidden fruit of the 
Bible Paradise. It originated many cycles back and 
gradually flourished, until its impress was stamped 
upon all our fellow-creatures. At first starting as 
selfish desires, then urging motives for rivalry, it re- 
sulted in fierce contest between man and man. The 
concentration of the soul in selfish energy clouded the 
inner spiritual nature, destroyed the trace of ethereal 
descent, and buried us deep in the material world. 
But this " fall into matter " is really but a necessary 
curve of the spiral, and is the dawn of a brighter day 
such as humanity has never seen. 

Death marks the origin of the turn which human 
evolution is at present describing. The earlier races 
had no sense of age and did not die. Like Enoch, they 
" walked with God " into the next period of their 
life. At present when a man dies his ego holds the 
impetus of his earthly desires until they are purged 
away from that higher self, which then passes into a 
spiritual state, where all the psychic and spiritual 
forces it has generated during the earthly life are un- 
folded. It progresses on these planes until the dor- 
mant physical impulses assert themselves and curve 
the soul around to another incarnation, whose form is 
the resultant of the earlier lives. 

The successive appearances of the soul upon one or 
many earths are a series of personalities which are 
the various masks assumed by one individuality, the 
numerous parts played by one actor. In each birth 
the personality differs from the prior and later exist- 
ence, but the one line of individual continuity runs 



270 ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 

unbroken through all the countless forms ; and as 
the soul enters into its highest development it gradu- 
ally comprehends the whole course of forgotten paths 
which have led to the summit. 

The time spent by each soul in physical life is only 
a small fraction of the whole period elapsing before 
the next incarnation. The larger part of the time is 
passed in the spiritual existence following death, in 
which the physical desires and spiritual qualities de- 
rived from the earthly life determine the condition 
of being, until the impetus of unconscious character 
brings the individual into another earthly life. 



XII 

TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 



All things are but altered, nothing dies, 
And here and there th' unbodied spirit flies 
By time and force or sickness dispossessed 
And lodges where it lights in man or beast. 

Pythagoras, in Dryden's Ovid. 

What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl ? 
That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. 
What thickest thou of his opinion ? 

I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion. 

Shakespeare. 

Whoever leaves off being virtuous ceases to be human ; and since he 
cannot attain to a divine nature he is turned into a beast. — Boethius. 

Be not under any brutal metempsychosis while thou livest and 
walkest about erectly under the form of man. Leave it not disputed 
at last how thou hast predominantly passed thy days. — Sir Thomas 
Browne. 

That which has saved India and Egypt through so many mis- 
fortunes and preserved their fertility is neither the Nile nor the 
Ganges; it is the respect for animal life by the mild and gentle 
heart of man. — Michelet. 

Oh! the beautiful time will, must come when the beast-loving 
Brahmin shall dwell in the cold north and make it warm, when man 
who now honors humanity shall also begin to spare and finally to 
protect the animated ascending and descending scale of living crea- 
tures. — Richter. 

As many hairs as grow on the beast, so many similar deaths shall 
the man who slays that beast for his own satisfaction in this world 
pass through in the next from birth to birth. — Laws of Mantj. 



XII. 

TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 

The idea of reincarnation is so intimately connected 
and so generally identified with the notion that human 
souls sometimes descend into lower animals, that it is 
necessary for us to thoroughly understand the exoteric 
and gross nature of this grotesque phrasing of a sol- 
emn and beautiful truth. 

All the philosophies and religions teaching rein- 
carnation seem to teach also the wandering of hu- 
man souls through brute forms. It was the common 
belief in Egypt and still is in Asia. All animals were 
sacred to the Egyptians as the masks of fallen gods, 
and therefore worshiped. The same reverence for 
all creatures still reigns in the East. The Hindu 
regards everything in the vast tropical jungle of illu- 
sion as a human soul in disguise. The Laws of Manu 
state : M For sinful acts mostly corporeal, a man shall 
assume after death a vegetable or mineral form ; for 
such acts mostly verbal, the form of a bird or beast ; 
for acts mostly mental, the lowest of human condi- 
tions." 

" A priest who has drunk spirituous liquors shall 
migrate into the form of a smaller or larger worm or 
insect, of a moth or some ravenous animal. 

" If a man steal grain in the husk he shall be born 



274 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 

a rat ; if a yellow-mixed metal, a gander ; if water, a 
plava or diver ; if honey, a great stinging gnat ; if 
milk, a crow ; if expressed juice, a dog ; if clarified 
butter, an ichneumon weasel. v. 

" A Brahman killer enters the body of a dog, a 
bear, an ass, a tiger, or a serpent." 

Not only does this conception permeate the do- 
mains of Brahmanism and Buddhism ; it prevailed in 
Persia before the time of Zoroaster as since. Pythag- 
oras is said to have obtained it in Babylon from the 
Magi, and through him it scattered widely through 
Greece and Italy. More closely than with any other 
teacher, this false doctrine is associated with the sage 
of Crotona, who is said to have recognized the voice 
of a deceased friend in the howling of a beaten dog. 
Plato seems to endorse it also. Plotinus says : " Those 
who have exercised human faculties are born again 
men. Those who have used only their senses go into 
the bodies of brutes, and especially into those of fero- 
cious beasts, if they have yielded to bursts of anger ; 
so that even in this case, the difference between the 
bodies that they animate conforms to the difference of 
their propensities. Those who have sought only to 
gratify their lust and appetite pass into the bodies of 
lascivious and gluttonous animals. Finally, those who 
have degraded their senses by disuse are compelled to 
vegetate in the plants. Those who have loved music 
to excess and yet have lived pure lives, go into the 
bodies of melodious birds. Those who have ruled 
tyrannically become eagles. Those who have spoken 
lightly of heavenly things, keeping their eyes always 
turned toward heaven, are changed into birds which 
always fly toward the upper air. He who has acquired 
civic virtues becomes a man ; if he has not these vir- 



TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 275 

tues he is transformed into a domestic animal, like the 
bee." 

Some of the church fathers also believed it. Pro- 
clus and Syrianus argued that the brute kept its own 
soul, but that the human soul which passed into the 
brute body was bound within the animal soul. Nearly 
all mythology contains this view of transmigration in 
some form. In the old Norse and German religions 
the soul is poetically represented as entering certain 
lower forms, as a rose, a pigeon, etc., for a short period 
before assuming the divine abode. The Druids of old 
Gaul also taught it. The Welsh bards tell us that the 
souls of men transmigrate into the bodies of those ani- 
mals whose habits and characters they most resemble, 
till, after a circuit of such penitential miseries, they 
are purified for the celestial presence. They mention 
three circles of existence : the circle of the all-inclos- 
ing circle which holds nothing alive or dead but God ; 
the second circle, that of felicity, in which men travel 
after they have meritoriously passed through their ter- 
restrial changes ; the circle of evil, in which human 
nature passes through the varying stages of existence 
which it must undergo before it is qualified to inhabit 
the circle of felicity, and this includes the three in- 
felicities of necessity, oblivion, and death, with frequent 
trials of the lower animal lives. 1 " Sir Paul Rycant 
gives us an account of several well-disposed Moham- 
medans that purchase the freedom of any little bird 
they see confined to a cage, and think they merit as 

1 This corresponds to the Hindu triple existence mentioned in 
the Laws of Maim : " Souls endued with goodness attain always 
the state of deities ; those filled with ambitious passions, the 
condition of men ; and those immersed in darkness, the nature 
of beasts. This is the threefold order of transmigration." 



276 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 

much by it as we should do here by ransoming any of 
our countrymen from their captivity at Algiers. The 
reason is because they consider every animal as a 
brother or sister in disguise, and therefore think them- 
selves obliged to extend their charity to them, though 
under such mean circumstances. They tell you that 
the soul of a man, when he dies, immediately passes 
into the body of another man, or some brute which he 
resembled in his humor, or his fortune, when he was 
one of us." l Pythagorean transmigration is appar- 
ent also in the natives of Mexico, who think that the 
souls of persons of rank after death inhabit the bodies 
of beautiful, sweet singing birds and the nobler 
quadrupeds, while the souls of inferior persons pass into 
weasels, beetles, and other low creatures. Among the 
negroes, the Sandwich Islanders, the Tasmanians, in 
short, among nearly all the world outside of Chris- 
tendom, this faith rules unquestioned. 

The lowest forms of this belief are found among the 
tribes of Africa and America, which think that the 
soul immediately after death must seek out a new tene- 
ment, and, if need be, enter the body of an animaL 
Some of the Africans assume that the soul will choose 
the body of a person of similar rank to its former one, 
and therefore bury the dead near the houses of their 
relatives, enabling the unbodied souls to occupy 
their newborn children. Sometimes holes are dug in 
the grave to facilitate the soul's egress, and the house- 
doors are left open for its admission. The Druses 
hold firmly to the theory of transmigration. The 
folk-lore of all nations has various ways of telling how 
the soul of a man can inhabit an animal's body, in 
stories of wehr-wolves, swan-maidens, mermaids, etc. 
1 From Addison's Spectator. 



TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 277 

In many parts of Europe the belief in the man-wolf 
still flourishes in connection with a crazy person, or 
a monomaniac, who is said to be transformed into 
the brute nature. Northern Europe receives this 
superstition as the man-bear. In India it is the man- 
tiger ; in Abyssinia, the man-hyena ; in South Africa, 
the man-lion ; each country associating the depraved 
human nature, which sometimes runs riot as an epi- 
demic mania, with the animal most dreaded. 

But it is all a coarse symbol caricaturing the inner 
vital truth of reincarnation, and springing from the 
striking resemblance between men and animals, in 
feature and disposition, in voice and mien. The intel- 
ligence and kindness of the beasts approaching near 
to human character, and the brutality of some men, 
would seem to indicate that both races were closely 
enough related to exchange souls. As an English 
writer says : " A judicious critic or observant reader 
will scarce allow that more than four or five in the 
long catalogue of Roman emperors had any human- 
ity ; and although they might perhaps have a just 
claim to be styled Lords of the Earth, they had no 
right to the title of Man. There is an excellent dis- 
sertation in Erasmus on the princely qualities of the 
eagle and the lion ; wherein that great author has de- 
monstrated that emperors and kings are very justly 
represented by those animals, or that there must be a 
similarity in their souls, as all their actions are simi- 
lar and correspondent." l Emerson has a paragraph 
upon this in his essay on Demonology : " Animals 
have been called ; the dreams of nature.' Perhaps for 

1 Dr. William King, in the Dreamer, a series of satirical 
dreams, which humorously illustrate the alleged doctrine of 
Pythagoras and Plato, as well as the abuses of religion, etc. 



278 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS, 

a conception of their consciousness we may go to our 
own dreams. In a dream we have the instinctive obe- 
dience, the same torpidity of the highest power, the 
same unsurprised assent to the monstrous, as these 
metamorphosed men exhibit. Our thoughts in a 
stable or in a menagerie, on the other hand, may well 
remind us of our dreams. What comparison do these 
imprisoning forms awaken ! You may catch the 
glance of a dog sometimes which lays a kind of claim 
to sympathy and brotherhood. What! somewhat of 
me down there? Does he know it? Can he, too, as 
I, go out of himself, see himself, perceive relations ? 
We fear lest the poor brute should gain one dreadful 
glimpse of his condition. It was in this glance that 
Ovid got the hint of his metamorphoses ; Calidasa, of 
his transmigration of souls. For these fables are our 
own thoughts carried out. What keeps these wild 
tales in circulation for thousands of years? What 
but the wild fact to which they suggest some approxi- 
mation of theory? Nor is the fact quite solitary, for 
in varieties of our own species where organization 
seems to predominate over the genius of man, in Kal- 
muck or Malay or Flathead Indian, we are sometimes 
pained by the same feeling; and sometimes, too, the 
sharp-witted prosperous white man awakens it. In a 
mixed assembly we have chanced to see not only a 
glance of Abdiel, so grand and keen, but also in other 
faces the features of the mink, of the bull, of the rat, 
and the barn-door fowl. You think, could the man 
overlook his own condition, he could not be restrained 
from suicide. " 

The remarkable mental cleverness of the highest 
animals, the cunning of the fox, the tiger's fierceness, 
the serpent's meanness, the dog's fidelity, seem to be 



TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 279 

human traits in other forms, and the animal qualities 
are striking enough in many men for them to be fitly 
described as a fox, a hog, a snake, etc. The charac- 
teristics of animals are accurately termed in expres- 
sions first applied to mankind, and the community of 
disposition between the erect and the debased animal 
creation has furnished words for human qualities from 
the lower orders of life, — as leonine, canine, vulpine, 
etc. Briefly, " the rare humanity of some animals and 
the notorious animality of some men " first suggested 
the idea of interchanging their souls among the primi- 
tive peoples, and has nourished it ever since among the 
oldest portion of the race as a vulgar illustration of a 
vital reality. 

As the fruits of this idea are beneficial, it was 
firmly held by the priests and philosophers as a moral 
fable, through which they popularly taught not only 
reincarnation, bat respect for virtue and for life. It 
wrought a poetic love of nature in the masses such as 
has never been seen under any other influence — and 
which Christianity has strangely failed to establish. 
Lecky candidly says in his " European Morals " : " In 
the inculcation of humanity to animals on a wide scale 
the Mohammedans and the Brahmins have considera- 
bly surpassed the Christians." 

To the eastern mind life is a stream flowing through 
endless transformations, and everything containing it 
is divine, from the commonest onion to the crowned 
king ; and as all living things are the possible case- 
ments of human souls, it is the height of impiety to 
abuse anything. The kindness of the Orient toward 
the brute creation is a beautiful comment upon the 
genuineness of this faith. The mercy due from man 
to his friends the lower animals is a noble bequest 



280 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 

which has there been treasured for the world. As 
the wholesome lesson of transmigration, Asia has thor- 
oughly learned that 

He prayeth best who loveth best 

All things both great and small, 
For the dear Lord who loveth us 

He made and loveth all. 

But the intelligent leaders of oriental thought were 
far from believing transmigration literally. The oc- 
cult theory of the priests of Isis, like that of the Brah- 
mans, Buddhists, and Chaldeans, never really held that 
human souls inhabit animals, or that animal soul 3 oc- 
cupy men, although many orientalists have not pene- 
trated beyond this outer court of eastern doctrine. It 
was simply an allegorical gospel for the masses with 
a double purpose, — to picture the inner truth which 
acute thinkers would reach and which the crowds need 
not know, and to instill respect for all life. The 
Egyptian priesthood adopted three styles of teaching 
all doctrine. The vulgar religion of the populace was 
a crude shaping of the priestly thought. The priests 
of the outer temple received the half-veiled tenets 
of initiates. But only the hierophants of the inner 
temple, after final initiation, were allowed to know 
the pure truth. The same triple shaping of the cen- 
tral thought, adapted to the audience, was followed 
by Pythagoras, Plato, and all the great masters. Al- 
though the name of Pythagoras is synonymous with 
the idea of soul-wandering through animals, a careful 
perusal of the fragments of his writings, and of his 
disciples' books, shows that he tremendously realized 
the fact that souls must always, by all the forces of 
the universe, find an adequate expression of their 



TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 281 

strongest nature, and that it would be as impossible 
for a gallon to be contained in a pint measure, as for 
a human spirit to inhabit an animal body. That the 
teaching of Pythagoras on this point was purely alle- 
gorical is proven by the abridgment of his philosophy 
given by his disciple Hierocles : " The man who has 
separated himself from a brutal life by the right use 
of reason, purified himself as much as is possible from 
excess of passions, and by this become a man from 
a wild beast, shall become a God from a man, as far 
as it is possible for a man to become a God. . . . We 
can only cure our tendency downwards by the power 
that leads upwards, by a ready submission to God, 
by a total conversion to the divine law. The end of 
the Pythagorean doctrine is to be all wings for the 
reception of divine good, that when the time of death 
comes we may leave behind us upon earth the mor- 
tal body, and be ready girt for our heavenly journey. 
Then we are restored to our primitive state. This is 
the most beautiful end." 

Hierocles also comments on the Golden Verses of 
Pythagoras : " If through a shameful ignorance of the 
immortality annexed to our soul, a man should persuade 
himself that his soul dies with his body, he expects 
what can never happen ; in like manner he who ex- 
pects that after his death he shall put on the body of 
a beast, and become an animal without reason, because 
of his vices, or a plant because of his dullness and stu- 
pidity, — such a man, I say, acting quite contrary to 
those who transform the essence of man into one of the 
superior beings, is infinitely deceived, and absolutely 
ignorant of the essential form of the soul, which can 
never change ; for being and continuing always man, 
it is only said to become God or beast by virtue or 



282 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 

vice, though it cannot be either the one or the other." 1 
The early Neo-Platonists of Alexandria limited the 
range of human metempsychosis to human bodies and 
denied that the souls of men ever passed downwards 
into brutal states. Even the apparent endorsement of 
that conceit by Plotinus, quoted above, was merely a 
simile. Porphyry, Jamblichus, and Hierocles forcibly 
emphasized this distinction. Wilkinson shows that the 
initiated priests taught that " dissolution is only the 
cause of reproduction. Nothing perishes which has 
once existed. Things which appear to be destroyed 
only change their natures and pass into another form." 
But Ebers demonstrates that the inner circle of the 
temple held this truth in a form wholly above the sys- 
tem of embalming, animal worship, and transmigration 
ingeniously devised by them for the people. Like the 
ruling priestcraft in all times and countries, they con- 
sidered it necessary to disguise their sacred secrets for 
the crowd. The symbols of reincarnation which every- 
where have typified the same doctrine, — in Egyptian 
architecture by the flying globe, in Chinese pagodas 
and Indian temples by the intricate unfoldments of ger- 
minant designs ascending through successive stories to 
culminate in a gilded ball, in the Grecian friezes of reli- 
gious processions, in the Druidical cromlechs and cairns 
of Wales and the circular stone heaps of Britain, — all 
expressed a threefold significance, telling the masses 
of their transition through all living conditions, re- 
minding the common priesthood of an exalted series 
of transformations, and picturing for the initiates the 
hidden principles of immortal progress. For all alike 

1 From Dacier's Life of Pythagoras, with his Symbols and Golden 
Verses, together with the Life of Hierocles, and his Commentaries upon 
the Verses, p. 335. London, 1721. 



TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 283 

these emblems reiterated the solemn and vital reality 
of universal brotherhood throughout Nature ; but the 
keenest students, who guided the bulk of religious 
thought, read in them simply the eternal law of cause 
and effect divinely ruling the soul through incessant 
changes. It would be as unjust to construe literally 
the poetic statements of the human soul wandering 
through animals, etc., by which metaphor the noblest 
leaders of western thought convey the idea of spirit- 
ual evolution (see chapter v.), as to call this lowest 
phase of the philosophy the real belief of those who 
shaped it. 

And yet there is a sense in which the most intelli- 
gent orientals adhere to this, and in which western 
science endorses it, — namely in the axiomatic truth 
that human atoms and emanations traverse the entire 
round of lower natures. When the Laws of Manu 
speak of the transmigration of men through all animal 
stages, these eastern authorities say that they mean 
not souls, but men's physical selves. When the Laws 
assert that " a Brahman killer enters the body of a 
dog, bear, ass, etc.," they do not mean that the mur 
derer of a priest becomes a dog, bear, ass, etc. The 
inner meaning of the Law is that he who kills and 
extinguishes the Brahman or divine nature, condemns 
his soul to lower human circunmances, and the down- 
ward affinity of his passions carries every particle of 
his body by magnetic relations into more degraded 
ranks of existence. The Brahmans have distorted the 
inward purpose of this Law in their own interest by 
insisting upon its outward meaning. So the various 
accounts of the descent of human into animal or vege- 
tative nature, whether given by Hindu, Pythagorean, 
Platonist, Egyptian, Norse, or Barbarian, are actual 



284 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 

facts as far as the migration of the composing atoms 
and emanations of the outer individual are concerned. 
For these atoms obey the directing impulses of degrad- 
ing passion or ascending principle. The imponderable 
force of these atomic changes is proven by the psycho- 
metric evidence of sensitives, who perceive the various 
unexpressed moods of a person by the kinds of lam- 
bent particles flowing from him, and trace the perma- 
nent course of these particles after they have lodged 
on objects widely separated from him. The tell-tale 
characteristics of these scattered atoms remain a Ions: 
while as stamped by their source, and guide them to 
what is most congenial. This scientific fact, confirmed 
by many experiments, 1 but generally ignored, shaped 
the old atomic hypotheses in which Pythagoras, Epi- 
curus, Zeno, and all the old philosophers down to Plato 
found delight, and Plato himself simply spiritualized 
it into a more enduring form. 

The attitude of the dominant disciples of reincar- 
nation upon this point may be gathered from the fol- 
lowing statement of a Brahman to the writer : " The 
whole question of re-births rests upon the right under- 
standing of what it is that is born again. Obviously 
not the body, nor is it the ego, which is the same 
whether in a man or in a worm. The ego is colorless 
of all attributes of which we have any knowledge in 
practice. The only thing that can be said to be re- 
born is the character of a being, through spiritual 
blindness confounded with the ego, in the same way 
as light is commonly confounded with the objects il- 
luminated and said to be red, blue, or any other color. 
The essential characteristic of humanity cannot pos- 

1 See the psychometric investigations, recorded in Professor 
Denton's book The Soul of Things. 



TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 285 

sibly exist in an animal form, for otherwise it cannot 
be essential to humanity. Whenever in a human 
being the ego is identified in the above manner with 
what is essentially human, birth in an animal form is 
as certain as any relative truth can be not to take 
place." 

" Atoms enter into organic combinations according 
to their affinities, and when released from one indi- 
vidual system they retain a tendency to be attracted 
by other systems, not necessarily human, with similar 
characteristics. The assimilation of atoms by organ- 
isms takes place in accordance with the law of affini- 
ties. It may be hastily contended that the relation 
between the mental characteristics of an individual 
and the atoms of his body ceases when the atoms no 
longer constitute the body. But the fact that certain 
atoms are drawn into a man's body shows that there 
was some affinity between the atoms and the body be- 
fore they were so drawn together. Consequently 
there is no reason to suppose that the affinity ceases 
at parting. And it is well known that psychometers 
can detect the antecedent life history of any substance 
by being brought into contact with it. It must be in- 
sisted that the true human ego in no sense migrates 
from a human body to an animal body, although those 
principles which lie below the plane of self-conscious- 
ness may do so. And in this sense alone is transmi- 
gration accepted by Esoteric Science. " 



XIII. 

WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL? 



When we die, we shall find that we have not lost our dreams ; but 
that we have only lost our sleep. — Richter. 

Life is a kind of sleep. Old men sleep longest. They never begin 
to wake but when they are to die. — De La Bruyere. 

There is no death : what seems so is transition. 

This life of mortal breath 
Is but a suburb of the life Elysian, 

Whose portal we call Death. 

Longfellow. 

We can hardly do otherwise than assume that the future being must 
be so involved in our present constitution as to be therein discernible. 

Isaac Taylor. 

When I leave this rabble rout and defilement of the world, I leave 
it as an inn, and not as a place of abode. For nature has given us 
our bodies as an inn, and not to dwell in. — Cato. 

He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption ; but 
he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting. 

St. Paul. 

But all lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love. 
No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love. 
The years of heaven will all earth's little pain make good. 
Together there we can begin again in babyhood. 

Helen Hunt. 

Death is another life. We bow our heads 
At going out, we think, and enter straight 
Another chamber of the king's, 
Larger than this we leave and lovelier. 

Bailey. 

The deep conviction of the indestructibleness of our nature through 
death, which everyone carries at the bottom of his heart, depends alto- 
gether upon the consciousness of the original and eternal nature of our 
being. — Schopenhauer. 



XIII. 

WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL? 

The latest developments of science agree with the 
occultists and poets that there is no death, and that 
nothing is dead. What seems to be extinction is only 
a change of existence. What appears to have no vital- 
ity has only a lower order of the life principle. Every- 
thing is pulsing with energy, stones and dirt as well 
as animals and trees. The same force which animates 
the human body, the beasts, birds, and reptiles in 
their brief periods, also vitalizes the oaks and vines in 
a smaller degree with longer lives, and individualizes 
the mineral world into crystals on a still lower plane 
but with lifetimes reckoned by thousands of years. 
And below crystal-life, in the constituent atoms of 
shapeless master, is a tremendous thrill of undimin- 
ished activity. Life, the occultists say, is the eternal 
uncreated energy. The physicists grasp at the same 
thing in their Law of Continuity, and modern science 
concedes that " energy has as much claim to be re- 
garded as an objective reality as matter itself." * 
This life is the one essential energy acting under 
protean forms. It always inheres in every particle of 
matter, and makes no distinction between organic and 
inorganic, except one of grade, the former containing 
1 Stewart and Tait, in The Unseen Universe. 



290 WHAT OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELLt 

life-energy actively and the latter in dormant form. 
Because the scientist is unable to awaken into activ- 
ity the latent life of inorganic matter, he insists, by 
the law of biogenesis, that life can only come from 
life. But that only marks the limit of his knowl- 
edge. The world's development has bridged all the 
gaps now yawning between the different kingdoms 
of nature, though nothing remains now to show how 
it was done, and science has to confess its ignorance. 
There is nothing to contradict and much to enforce 
the occult axiom that the same life animates man, 
plant, and rock simply in different states of the one 
indestructible force, — the Universal Soul, — making 
all nature what Goethe terms " the living visible gar- 
ment of God." 

It is impossible for a person to cease to exist. When 
the tenant of the body moves out, the forces binding 
together the dwelling scatter to the nearest uses 
awaiting them. The positivists would have it that 
the individual soul also dissolves into an impersonal 
fund of being — a sort of immediate chilling Nirvana, 
out-freezing any eastern conception of remotest des- 
tiny. This melancholy result of western materialism 
is boldly confronted by reincarnation with a proven 
hypothesis, which illuminates the mystery of death 
and the future, and shows the unimpeachable reality 
of immortality. Reincarnation demonstrates that the 
personal ego, which permanently maintains its identity 
amid the constant changes of the bodily casement and 
the mental consciousness, must continue its individu- 
ality. In addition to the evidences already adduced 
for the genuineness of this truth, there stands the hon- 
est reliable testimony of spiritualism (a small core of 
veritable fact around which is gathered an enormous 



., VEN, ANJJ ,.ELL? 291 

concretion of deceptions, mischievously intentional or 
pathetically unconscious), and the actual experience 
of some orientals whose intense devotion to pure in- 
visible realities has pushed them into the perception of 
ultra-mortal things. 

It is the strong attachment to physical existence 
which makes death the king of terrors. Those who 
have learned the lesson of life find him the blessed an- 
gel who ushers them through the golden gates. There 
shall at length come to every ascending soul the expe- 
rience of those whose departure from this life cannot be 
called death, as Jesus, Elijah, or Enoch, who " walked 
with God and he was not, for God took him." They 
became so buoyed with spiritual forces that a slight 
touch shifted the equipoise and translated them into 
the invisible. The clarified spirit greets death with 
a welcome, and sings his praise as did Paul Hamilton 
Hayne in his dying song : — 

Sad mortal ! couldst thou but know 

What truly it means to die, 
The wings of thy soul would glow, 

And the hopes of thy heart beat high ; 
Thou wouldst turn from the Pyrrhonist schools, 

And laugh their jargon to scorn, 
As the babbling of midnight fools 

Ere the morning of Truth be born : 
But I, earth's madness above, 

In a kingdom of stormless breath, — 
I gaze on the glory of love 

In the unveiled face of Death. 

I tell thee his face is fair 

As the moon-bow's amber rings, 
And the gleam in his unbound hair 

Like the flash of a thousand springs ; 
His smile is the fathomless beam 

Of the star-shine's sacred light, 



292 WRA1 C TH t - 

When the si<*^ner3 of Southland dream 

In the lap of the holy Night : 
For I, earth's blindness above, 

In a kingdom of halcyon breath, — 
I gaze on the marvel of love 

In the unveiled face of Death. 

When death severs the soul from its mortal shell, 
the ruling tendencies of the soul carry it to its strong- 
est affinities. If these still dwell on earth, the soul 
hovers affectionately among the old scenes and insen- 
sibly mingles with its heart-friends, ministering and 
being: ministered to, with no essential difference from 
the former condition. 1 Many veritable experiences, 
apart from all possibility of delusion, confirm this, 
although the darkness of matter blinds most of us to 
the psychic life. At length, as shifting time unties 
the bonds of earth, the soul moves on with its strongest 
allies to the realms of its choice. There the soul lives 
out an era of its true life, an expression of its deepest 
nature, as much more full and more real than the late 
physical life, as the waking state exceeds the dream- 
ing. For the escape from material confinement al- 
lows the freest activity, in which the dominant desires, 
unconsciously nourished in the spirit, have the mas- 
tery. This liberty rouses the spirit from the earthty 
lethargy into its permanent individuality. The start- 
ling bound of the spirit into its own sphere must trans- 
fer the self -consciousness from its terrestrial form to a 
far higher vividness ; but, as the wakefulness of day 
includes the somnambulence of night and knows itself 
superior to that dumb life, so the burst of uncon- 
strained spiritual existence does not annul, but tran* 
scends the material phase. 

1 See The Gates Between, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 



T __ TR, , AND HELL? 293 

The condition of the period intervening between 
death and birth, like all other epochs, is framed by 
the individual. The inner character makes a Paradise, 
a Purgatory, or an Inferno of any place. As Jesus 
said he was in heaven while talking with his followers, 
as Dante found all the material for hell in what his 
eyes witnessed, so in the environments beyond death, 
where the subjective states of the soul are supreme, 
the appearance of the universe and the feelings of 
self are created, well or ill, by the central individual. 
There must be as many heavens and hells as there are 
good and bad beings. All the attempts to describe 
the future are inadequate and erroneous, and must 
necessarily be so. Plato, in the last book of the Re- 
public, quotes the narrative of the Pamphylian Er, 
who had been killed in battle but came to life again 
on his funeral pyre, and declared that he was re- 
turned to earth to disclose the nature of the coming 
life. He found things about as Plato's allegory pic- 
tures them : the good and the wicked who had just 
died being assigned their places in heaven or under 
the earth. A number of souls whose thousand years 
of one or the other experience had expired were made 
to cast lots for a choice out of a large number of hu- 
man and animal lives, and to drink of the River of 
Indifference, and to traverse the Plain of Forgetful- 
ness before entering the world again. As with all 
the visions of after-death, this simply reflected the 
opinions of the Platonic thinker. St. John's Revela- 
tion paints the scene by colors obtained from his 
Jewish training, on the canvas of his Patmos impris- 
onment. Bunyan's description shows a simple imagi- 
nation saturated with the Apocalypse. Protestant 
visionaries always discover a Protestant heaven and 



294 WHAT OF DEATH, iVEN % 

hell. Catholic ecstatics always add purgatory. 
Swedenborg found the gardens of heaven laid out in 
the Dutch fashion of his time. Englis'h' clairvoyants 
and mediums are properly orthodox and evangelical. 
American spirits talk broad theology with ridiculous 
details. The divergence in all these alleged liftings 
of the veil betrays their subjectiveness. 

It is impossible in the nature of things that one 
should permanently leave the physical condition until 
the business of that existence is accomplished in trans- 
ferring the affections from material to spiritual things. 
While the ruling attraction to a soul remains in this 
world, all the forces of the universe conspire to con- 
tinue the association of the two in repeated lives. On 
the other hand, a person dominated by spiritual pro- 
clivities finds infinite magnetisms drawing him away 
from temporal surroundings to the inscrutable glories 
of the eternal. In Swedenborg's phrase, "a man's 
loves make his home." The residual impulses coming 
from the momentums of past lives determine what 
and when shall be the next embodiment. The time 
and manner of reincarnation vary with each indi- 
vidual according to the impetus engendered by his 
lives. Between these lives the spiritual effect of the 
earth -life is absorbed from the personal soul mani- 
fested on earth into the immortal and unmanifested 
ego. This process may require days, years, centuries, 
or millenniums, depending upon the intensity of the 
mundane aspirations which draw the spirit to earth 
and hinder its liberation into pure spiritual life. But 
as in dreams a whole life's history is sometimes 
condensed into a few seconds, time has no existence to 
the disembodied spirit. Whether the interval be long 
or short, the entire spiritual effect of the last life must 



DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL? 295 

be assimilated and shaped into a form that will spring 
up in coming lives. The instances of alternate con- 
sciousness indicate '"hat some such marked difference 
from the previous incarnation appears in each earthly 
life, losing all remembrance of the previous chapter, 
and working out the tendencies which embodied that 
particular life in a career that will achieve redemption 
or condemnation. 

At the first thought reincarnation carries the un- 
welcome inference that death and re-births separate 
us from the dearest present ties and introduce us as 
strangers into new phases of activity where every- 
thing — friends, knowledge, and occupations — must 
be found afresh. This is a mistake. The unnoticed 
habits of thought and action derived from the alliance 
of cherished comrades strengthen into ungovernable 
steeds whose course directs the soul on every journey 
toward those favorite companions. Among the thou- 
sands of acquaintances made in a lifetime, the rare 
friends whose intimacy strikes down into the inmost 
depths of the soul must continue as irresistible attrac- 
tions in the next life. Orpheus could not fail to dis- 
cover Eurydice in the spirit realm. In this earthly 
existence, which is the Heaven, or Purgatory, or Hell 
of the last one, we go straying among unfamiliar 
forms, frequently mistaking them for true friends, un- 
til suddenly we meet a soul with which there comes so 
intense and permanent an affection that every other 
person is forgotten. Such a fusion of spirits must 
hail from the shores of long distant loves, and its new 
unrecognized mastery develops a mightier union than 
would be possible in one uninterrupted flow. The 
poets like to symbolize this as the blending of two 
hemispheres long since separated into their original 



296 WHAT OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL? 

perfect whole. The most probable explanation of such 
intimacies rests in the idea that they are repetitions of 
previous attachments. A sense of ancient familiarity 
grows upon these closest ties, notwithstanding the ab- 
sence of memory's confirmation. The powerful attrac- 
tions residing in families and kinships may well be the 
result of ancestral affinities which have bound together 
in many earlier combinations, like a turning kaleido- 
scope, the same individuals. 



XIV. 

KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION 



We are our own children. — Pythagoras. 

Nothing can work me damage but myself. — St. Bernard. 

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill 
Our fatal shadows that walk with us still. 

Beaumont & Fletcher. 

The kingdom of heaven is within you. — Jesus. 

We make our fortunes and we call them fate. — B. Disraeli 

Men must reap the things they sow. 
Force from force must ever flow. 

Shelley. 

The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall it, or 
the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts. — Emerson. 

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such pain ; 

I never saw a brute I hated so. 

He must be wicked to deserve such pain. 

Browning. 

Not from birth does one become a slave ; not from birth does one 
become a saint ; but by conduct alone. — Gautama. 

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops ; and the pattern which 
was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up 
to-morrow. — Beecher. 

Then spake he of that answer all must give 
For all things done amiss or wrongfully, 
Alone, each for himself, reckoning with that 
The fixed arithmetic of the universe, 
Which meteth good for good, ill for ill, 
Measure for measure unto deeds, words, thoughts, 
Making" all futures fruits of all the pasts. 

The Light of Asia. 



XIV. 

KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION. 

Karma is the eastern word for what the West 
knows as the Law of Causation, applied to personal 
experience. In Christendom the full recognition of 
this great principle, like that of its mate, reincarna- 
tion, lies dormant ; but it is merely an extension into 
the spiritual domain of the fundamental premise of all 
science, the substratum of common sense, the cardinal 
axiom of every philosophy, — that each effect has an 
adequate cause, and each cause works infinite conse- 
quences. Briefly, the doctrine of karma is that we 
have made ourselves what we are by former actions, 
and are building our future eternity by present ac- 
tions. There is no destiny but what we ourselves 
determine. There is no salvation or condemnation 
except what we ourselves bring about. God places 
all the powers of the universe at our disposal, and the 
handle by which we use them to construct our fate has 
been and is and always shall be our own individual 
will. Action (karma) of the spirit, whether in the 
inner consciousness alone, or by vocal expression, or 
in outward act, is the secret force which directs our 
journeys through infinity, driving us down into the 
gloomy regions of evil, of matter, and of selfishness, or 
up toward the luminous fields of good, of spirit, and of 
love. 



300 KARMA. 

The most adamantine of facts is that of an infinite 
all-comprehending power of which nature is the puls- 
ing body, an eternal reality shaping the shadowy ap- 
pearances of time, and variously named Force, Fate, 
Justice, Eighteousness, Love, Mind, The Over-Soul, 
God. The most essential attribute of this unfathom- 
able Being is that of Almighty Equity. Confronting 
this fact is the puzzling fact of our spiritual personal- 
ity enveloped in matter. The thought always asso- 
ciated with this, never practically forsaken, though 
sometimes theoretically denied, is individual responsi- 
bility. " Two things fill me with wonder," said Kant, 
" the starry heavens and the sense of moral responsi- 
bility in man." When Daniel Webster was asked 
what was the greatest thought that ever stirred his 
soul, he replied, " The thought of my personal account- 
ability to God." Every balanced mind agrees with 
these intellectual giants on this point. The inevitable 
outcome of grouping these two actualities (God and 
responsibility) is the conception that the Universal 
Sustainer is giving every creature the best thing for it, 
and that each soul is in some way accountable for its 
condition. Single observations seem to contradict this 
idea, but the long trend of life's experience verifies it. 
Because it offers no shelter for culpable actions and 
necessitates a sterling manliness, it is less welcome to 
weak natures than the easy religious tenets of vicari- 
ous atonement, intercession, forgiveness, and death-bed 
conversions. But it rings through the inner soul-world 
as the fundamental harmonic tone, setting the key for 
all wholesome poetry, philosophy, religion, and art, and 
inspiring the magnificent sweep of progress which is 
rationalizing modern Christendom. For it is identical 
with the essence of Bible truth, as these represent^ 
tive sentences will suggest : — 



KARMA. 301 

" Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are 
the issues of life." (Solomon.) 

" Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee." 
(Jesus.) 

" Work out your own salvation. Whatsoever a 
man soweth, that shall he also reap." (St. Paul.) 

The embryos of all animals are at the earliest stage 
indistinguishable from one another. The biologist 
who has lost his labels cannot tell which would be- 
come a fish, which a cat, and which a man ; but na- 
ture knows the past records and therefore the future 
possibility of each. So within souls apparently simi- 
lar there hide unsuspected germs of vast difference, 
resulting from the forgotten pasts, which may develop 
into corresponding divergent futures. The ancient 
behaviors of every soul have accumulated a grand her- 
itage of influences from which our present bequest is 
derived. Using another figure, as each piece of " new " 
soil contains through all its depth a multitude of va- 
rious seeds sown in past ages, which patiently bide 
their time to be brought to light and bear fruit, so the 
kernels of remote conducts shall eventually all have 
their unfoldment in the revolution of our lives, until 
at last, if we refuse weeds and harbor only worthy 
germs, we shall bear a continual harvest of good. 

The " bonds of action " include the whole range of 
material for character, — not only the recognized hab- 
its of the soul, but, of more consequence still, the un- 
conscious inner thought whence the outward manifes- 
tations spring. Whatever impulses are secretly cher- 
ished, these feed the acts of life, and mould all our 
environments to fit them. The nurtured thought of 
killing produces a thousand unseen murders and must 
continue wreaking crimes in immensely larger degree 



302 KARMA. 

than hangable horrors. Our favorite inclinations 
show what we have been doing in ancient ages. 
Within the germ of to-day's conduct are coiled inter- 
minable consequences of good and evil. 

The relentless hand which metes out our fortunes 
with the stern justice most vividly portrayed by the 
Greek dramatists in their Nemesis, Fates, and Furies, 
takes from our own savings the gifts bestowed on us. 
" Alas ! we sow what we reap ; the hand that smites us 
is our own." In the domain of eternal justice, the 
offense and the punishment are inseparably connected 
as the same event, because there is no real distinction 
between the action and its outcome. He who injures 
another in fact only wrongs himself. To adopt 
Schopenhauer's figure, he is a wild beast who fastens 
his fangs in his own flesh. But linked with the awful 
fact of our undivided responsibility for what we now 
are, goes the inspiring assurance that we have in our 
control the remedy of evil and the increase of good. 
We can, and we alone can, extricate ourselves from 
the existing limitations, by the all-curing powers of 
purity, love, spirituality. In eastern phraseology, the 
purpose of life is to work out our bad karma (action) 
and to stow away good karma. As surely as the har- 
vest of to-day grows from the seed-time of yesterday, 
so shall every kernel of thought and feeling, speech 
and performance, bring its crop of reward or rebuke. 
The inherent result of every quiver of the human will 
continually tolls the Day of Judgment, and affords 
immeasurable opportunities for amelioration. 

The worthy soul straitened with misfortune is 
shifting off the chains of old wrong-doing. The 
vicious soul enjoying comforts is reaping the benefits 
of old virtues. So intricately are all situations con- 



KARMA. 303 

nected with untraceable lineages that only the Omni- 
scient can penetrate below appearances in the real 
natures of men. The world is like a garden in which 
is newly planted a huge assortment of unknown plants. 
To the common observer the fresh sprouts are only 
deceptive, for the most promising stalk may prove to 
be a weak, fragile thing, and the uninviting leaflets 
may introduce a sturdy growth. But the all-wise 
Gardener knows each seed, and that it will ultimately 
show its ancestry. The stupendous issues of conduct 
endure through all changes. After one has climbed to 
high summits of character the surprising reappearance 
of some forgotten sin may stay his progress and re- 
quire all his forces to conquer the viper whose egg he 
long ago nested in his bosom. The man plunged into 
the abyss of degradation may be a saint much farther 
advanced than those exalted persons who despise him. 

It is karma, or our old acts, that draws us back into 
earthly life. The spirit's abode changes according to 
its karma, and this karma forbids any long continu- 
ance in one condition, because it is always changing. 
So long as action is governed by material and selfish 
motives, just so long must the effect of that action be 
manifested in physical re-births. Only the perfectly 
selfless man can elude the gravitation of material life. 
Few have attained this ; but it is the goal of mankind. 
Some have reached it and have voluntarily returned as 
saviors of the race. 

An illustrious explanation of karma appears at the 
close of " The Light of Asia " : 

Karma — all that total of a soul 

Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had, 
The " self " it wove with woof of viewless time 

Crossed on the warp invisible of acts. 



"304 KARMA. 

What hath been bringeth what shall be, and is, 
Worse — better — last for first and first for last ; 

The angels in the heavens of gladness reap 
Fruits of a holy past. ' 

The devils in the underworlds wear out 

Deeds that were wicked in an age gone by. 

Nothing endures : fair virtues waste with time, 
Foul sins grow purged thereby. 

Who toiled a slave may come anew a prince 
For gentle worthiness and merit won ; 

Who ruled a king may wander earth in rags 
For things done and undone. 

Before beginning, and without an end, 
As space eternal and as surety sure, 

Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good, 
Only its laws endure. 

It will not be contemned of any one : 

Who thwarts it loses, and who serves it gains ; 

The hidden good it pays with peace and bliss, 
The hidden ill with pains. 

It seeth everywhere and marketh all : 

Do right — it recompenseth ! do one wrong — 

The equal retribution must be made, 
Though Dharma * tarry long. 

It knows not wrath nor pardon ; utter-true 

Its measures mete, its faultless balance weighs ; 

Times are as naught, to-morrow it will judge, 
Or after many days. 

By this the slayer's knife did stab himself ; 
The unjust judge hath lost his own defender ; 

1 Perfect Justice. 



, KARMA. 305 

The false tongue dooms its lie ; the creeping thief 
And spoiler rob, to render. 

Such is the law which moves to righteousness, 
Which none at last can turn aside or stay ; 

The heart of it is love, the end of it 

Is peace and consummation sweet. Obey ! 



The books say well, my brothers ! each man's life 

The outcome of his former living is ; 
The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes, 

The bygone right breeds bliss. 

That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields ! 

The sesamum was sesamum, the corn 
Was corn. The silence and the darkness knew ; 

So is a man's fate born. 

He cometh, reaper of the things he sowed, 
Sesamum, corn, so much cast in past birth ; 

And so much weed and poison-stuff, which mar 
Him and the aching earth. 

If he shall labor rightly, rooting these, 

And planting wholesome seedlings where they grew, 
Fruitful and fair and clean the ground shall be, 

And rich the harvest due. 

If he who liveth, learning whence woe springs, 

Endureth patiently, striving to pay 
His utmost debt for ancient evils done 

In love and truth alway ; 

If making none to lack, he throughly purge 
The lie and lust of self forth from his blood ; 

Suffering all meekly, rendering for offence 
Nothing but grace and good : 



306 KARMA. 

If he shall day by day dwell merciful. 

Holy and just and kind and true ; and rend 

Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots, 
Till love of life have end : 

He — dying — leaveth as the sum of him 

A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit, 

Whose good is quick and mighty, far and near, 
So that fruits follow it. 

No need hath such to live as ye name life ; 

That which began in him when he began 
Is finished : he hath wrought the purpose through 

Of what did make him man. 

Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins 
Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes 

Invade his safe eternal peace ; nor deaths 
And lives recur. He goes 

Unto Nirvana. He is one with Life 
Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be. 

Om, mani padme, om ! the dewdrop slips 
Into the shining sea ! 



This is the doctrine of the Karma. Learn ! 

Only when all the dross of sin is quit, 
Only when life dies like a white flame spent. 

Death dies along with it. 



XV. 

CONCLUSION. 



The glories of the Possible are ours. — Bayard Taylor. 

The majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the 
world. — Walt Whitman. 

There is no life of a man, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed 
or unrhymed. — Would' st thou plant for eternity : then plant into the 
deep infinite faculties of man. — Carlyle. 

Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads 
all who accept it astray. Religion, Science, Philosophy, though still 
at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that every existence is 
an aim. — Mazzini. 

A sacred burden is this life ye bear. 
Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly ; 
Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly ; 
Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin ; 
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win. 

Frances A. Kemble. 

Know that this world is one stage of eternity. For those who are 
journeying in the right way, it is the road of religion. It is a market 
opened in the wilderness where those who are travelling on their way 
to God may collect and prepare provisions for their journey. 

Al Gazzali. 

Life is but a means unto an end — that end, 
Beginning, mean, and end of ail things — God. 
We live in deeds, not years ; in thoughts, not breaths ; 
In feelings, not in figures on a dial. 
We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives 
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. 

Bailey. 

Heaven is not reached at a single bound, 
But we build the ladder by which we rise 
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, 

And we mount to its summit round by round. 

J. G. Holland. 



XV. 

CONCLUSION. 

We are lotus-eaters, so engrossed with the ignoble 
attractions around us as to have forgotten the places 
through which we have long strayed away from home, 
and to heed not the necessity of many more perilous 
journeys before we can reach our glorious destination. 
It is only by rousing ourselves to the important fact 
of the past pilgrimage by which we have traveled 
hither, and to the still more vital reality of the incal- 
culable sequences of our present route, that we can at- 
tain the best progress. Our repugnance to the idea 
of a cycle of lives, with myriad meanderings through 
varied forms, is the cry of Tennyson's Lotus-Eaters : 

While all things else have rest from weariness, 
All things have rest, why should we toil alone ? 

Nor ever fold our wings 

And cease our wanderings. 

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things ? 

This is virtually the longing for Nirvana, and the 
cause of the irrational belief in an eternal Heaven 
immediately following this life. But it is neither 
wise nor religious to ignore the necessity of continuing 
our ascent at the present pace, until we have jour- 
neyed all the way to that distant goal. The restless- 
ness of our nature comes from the established habit 



310 CONCLUSION. 

of straying about in temporal realms, and has de- 
veloped a love of adventure in which the occidental 
world finds profounder delight than in the oriental 
yearning for inactivity, and which shall have abun- 
dant exercise before it disappears. The only path to 
that perfect satisfaction which is found in complete 
oneness with the Supreme winds through the ascend- 
ing planes of material embodiment. 

Still must I climb if I would rest : 
The bird soars upward to his nest ; 
The young leaf on the tree-top high 
Cradles itself within the sky. 

I cannot in the valley stay ; 
The great horizons stretch away ! 
The very cliffs that wall me round 
Are ladders into higher ground. 

And heaven draws near as I ascend ; 
The breeze invites, the stars befriend. 
All things are beckoning to the Best ; 
I climb to Thee, my God, for rest ! l 

In which one of its various guises we shall receive 
reincarnation depends upon the individual. Whether 
it shall be in the crude form of transmigration through 
animals as received by most of the world ; or in the 
Persian and Sufi faith as the unjust banishment from 
our proper home by the powers of evil ; or, following 
Egypt, Pythagoras, Plato, Origen, and the Druids, as 
a purgatorial punishment for pre-natal sins ; or, in the 
form of some Christian teaching, as a probationary 
stage testing our right to higher existence and usher- 
ing us into a permanent spiritual condition; or, as 
maintained alike by the acutest Eastern philosophy 
1 From Lucy Larcom. 



CONCLUSION. 311 

and the soundest Western thought, as a wholesome 
development of germinal soul-forces ; — through all 
these phrasings the same central truth abides, furnish- 
ing what Henry More called " the golden key " for 
the problem of life, and explaining the plot of this 
" drama whose prologue and catastrophe are both 
alike wanting." But the broadest intelligence leads 
us directly into the evolutionary aspect of reincarna- 
tion, and finds the others inadequate to the full meas- 
' ure of human nature. In this view the present life 
is one grade of a stupendous school, in which we are 
being educated for a destiny so far beyond our com- 
prehension that some call it a kind of deity. The ex- 
periences through which we have come were needful 
for our strengthening. Even though we have de- 
scended below former altitudes, the only path to the 
absolute lies through the sensuous earthly vale. Sin 
itself, after we have escaped it, will lead to a mightier 
result than would be possible without ifc, or it would 
not be permitted. The richest trees of all the forest 
world spring from the unclean miasmic fens. The 
severest present disciplines, coming from our earlier 
errors, are training us for a loftier growth than we 
ever knew. Our physical schooling, through all the 
grades necessary to our best unfoldment, will build a 
character as much sublimer than our primitive condi- 
tion as virtue overtowers innocence, and when the race 
finally emerges from the jangling turmoil of self-will 
into complete harmony with the Perfect One, as it 
must at last, the multitudes of our lives will not seem 
too enormous a course of experience for the establish- 
ment of that consummation. The victorious march 
of Evolution through all the provinces of thought will 
at length be followed by the triumphal procession of 
Reincarnation. 



312 CONCLUSION. 

There is a spirit in all things that live 
Which hints of patient change from kind to kind ; 

And yet no words its mystic sense can give, 
Strange as a dream of radiance to the blind. 

And as in time unspeakably remote 

Vague frenzies in inferior brains set free 

Presaged a power no language could denote, 
So dreams the mortal of the God to be. 1 

The Father's purpose with us seems to be to edu- 
cate us as His children so that we shall be in complete 
sympathy with the divine mind. The only method 
of accomplishing this glorious result is for us to enter 
with Him into all the phases of His being. Our long 
series of physical lives will finally give us a thorough 
knowledge of the grosser nature with which He cloaks 
Himself. We penetrate the animal existence in hu- 
man form more successfully than would be possible if 
we transmigrated into all the species of zoology ; for 
here we carry sufficient intelligence, along with the 
material condition, to comprehend these creatures 
around us which cannot understand themselves. We 
cannot expect to permanently leave this department 
of God's house until we have essentially grasped the 
secret of all earthly life. The highest individuals of 
mankind, the saviors of the race, the true prophets 
and poets, attain this intimate communion with nature, 
this mastery over the lower creation, which demon- 
strates their fitness for introduction to a higher stage. 

It is difficult to account for the great geniuses ex- 
cept by the consideration that they are the result of 
many noble lives. Emerson arrives at this conclusion 
in his essay on Swedenborg. " In common parlance, 
what one man is said to learn by experience, a man 
1 From A. E. Lancaster. 






CONCLUSION. 813 

of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, 
to divine. The Arabians say that Abul Khain, the 
mystic, and Abu Ali Scena, the philosopher, conferred 
together ; and on parting the philosopher said, ' All 
that he sees, I know ; ' and the mystic said, ' All that 
he knows, I see.' If one should ask the reason of this 
intuition, the solution would lead us into that property 
which Plato denoted as reminiscence, and which is 
implied by the Brahmans in the tenet of transmigra- 
tion. The soul having been often born, or, as the 
Hindoos say, ' traveling the path of existence through 
thousands of births/ having beheld the things which 
are here, those which are in heaven, and those which 
are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not 
gained the knowledge : no wonder that she is able to 
recollect, in regard to one thing, what formerly she 
knew. For all things in nature being linked and re- 
lated, and the soul having heretofore known all, noth- 
ing hinders but that any man who has recalled to 
mind, or, according to the common phrase, has learned 
one thing only, should of himself recover all his an- 
cient knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he 
have but courage, and faint not in the midst of his 
researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence 
all. How much more, if he that inquires be a holy, 
godlike soul ! For by being assimilated to the origi- 
nal soul, by whom, and after whom, all things subsist, 
the soul of man does then easily flow into all things, 
and all things flow into it : they mix ; and he is pres- 
ent and sympathetic with their structure and law." 

A recent instance of the glaring facts inexplicable 
by any other theory than reincarnation appears in the 
little musical prodigy Josef Hofmann, whose phenom- 
enal genius holds complete mastery of the piano, and 



314 CONCLUSION. 

charms vast audiences with his exquisite rendering of 
most difficult concertos, and particularly with his 
marvelous improvisations upon themes suggested at a 
moment's notice. He presents the uncanny phenome- 
non of a child of ten who has little more to learn in 
the most difficult of arts. The natural explanation 
occurring to any candid mind is thus suggested by 
the Boston Herald in its report of a Hofmann con- 
cert : "It almost seems as if the spirit of some great 
composer had been put into this boy by nature, wait- 
ing to be developed in accordance with our modern 
art to shine forth again in all its glory in his work." 
What if he actually were the reappearance of Mozart 
hastening to fill out the life that was cut sadly short ? 
There may be means of verifying such a presumption 
by the character of his later compositions, when he 
gets the full expression of his natural bent. An art 
so independent of time and place, as music, might 
fairly be traced through two historic individuals, 
when literature and painting would not permit it. At 
any rate it is significant that the young prodigies in 
any particular kind of skill do not come until that 
skill has been well established on the earth. Guido 
followed generations of great painters. Pascal was 
preceded by a long course of mathematicians. Pope 
" lisped in numbers " after a vast procession of poets. 
And Mozart waited until the new era of musical har- 
mony had been well inaugurated. The colossal char- 
acters who stand out from the race, with no predeces- 
sors equal to them, like Homer, Plato, Jesus, Raphael, 
Shakespeare, Beethoven, all reach their maturity later 
than other prodigies, after infancy and youth have 
fastened the Lethean gates upon the prehistoric 
scenes from which they seem to hail. But the un- 



CONCLUSION. 315 

fathomable vagaries of the soul, as it works out suc- 
cessively its dominant impulses, easily disguise the 
individual in different personalities, so long as the 
physical realm is most attractive to it. Yet it is no- 
ticeable that the great minds of history come together 
in galaxies, when the fullness of time for their capa- 
cities draws them together. Witness the Sanskrit 
sages, the Greek poets and philosophers, the Augustan 
writers and generals, the Italian artists of the Renais- 
sance, the German masters of music, the Elizabethan 
authors, the nineteenth- century scientists. The traits 
of the commonest child, however, as much as the 
miracles of a genius, have no satisfactory explanation 
outside of the philosophy of re-births. 

Evolution of the physical nature and of material 
strength attaches our future to body and matter. But 
the attachment hastens toward a release by at length 
proving these to be low steps in the ascent of life. As 
in the geological programme of animal development 
each era carried its type to gigantic dimensions and 
then was surmounted by a higher order of creatures, 
which in turn grew monstrous as tyrants of their age 
and then succumbed to a still higher rank : so the 
soul's progress from the earthly domain lies through 
the mastery of physical things to mental, thence to 
psychic, and at last to spiritual. And the passion for 
material achievement animating our side of the planet 
should not be underestimated, since it governs an im- 
portant epoch in the world's growth. But the danger 
lies in esteeming it a finality. It is chiefly valuable 
as the foundation upon which we may build sky- 
ward, in an evolution of character. When the struc- 
ture is made high enough, the buoyancy of the upper 
stories will ponquer the weight of the base and float 



316 CONCLUSION. 

away our abode to ethereal climes. Only the educa- 
tion of the spiritual in us, of sacrifice, nobility, and 
divinity, can divorce us from these uneasy earthly af- 
finities to the permanent rest of union with God. 
While we must not abandon the glories of physical 
beauty, power and pleasure, we must not forget that 
the true business of life is to wean our affections from 
the visible to the invisible, to transfer the preponder- 
ance of our magnetisms from shadows to substances. 
For we bridge the two kingdoms of matter and spirit, 
and we have the choice between them more freely 
than we know. 

The mechanical transmigration which was fancifully 
told in Grecian mythology, gathered and beautifully 
rendered by Ovid, which was taught in the Egyptian 
and Pythagorean dogmas and still floats broadcast 
throughout the vast realms of Brahmanism, Buddhism, 
and barbarism, which fascinates the thought of our 
poets, and which is daily enacted by a myriad object- 
lessons in nature, is merely the objective expression of 
a subjective truth, discerned by all the mystics, seers, 
and philosophers, and most elaborately stated by Swe- 
denborg. It means that the infinite progress of the 
soul conveys it through countless epochs, moving in per- 
fect succession by the dynamic laws of its own being. 
During this development, the universe arranges itself 
peculiarly to each individual according to his thought 
and character. We shape the outer world by our 
inner nature, and we say just how long our stay shall 
be among dust and mortality. 

The true and wholesome aspect of the earthly life, 
under the religious philosophy of reincarnation, trans- 
forms the spectacle from a trivial show, or a gloomy 
arena of despair, to a majestic stage in ^the ascend- - 



CONCLUSION. 317 

ing series of human sojournings on the way to the Ab- 
solute. In the words of the old martyr-philosopher 
Giordano Bruno, the father of Descartes, Spinoza, and 
Leibnitz, the cherisher of that thought, " being present 
in the body, is yet, as by an indissoluble oath, bound 
and united to divine things, so that he is not sensible 
either of love or hatred for mortal things, knowing he 
is greater than these, and that he must not be the slave 
of his body, which is to be regarded as no other than 
the prison of his liberty, a snare for his wings, a chain 
upon his limbs, and a veil impeding his sight." His 
life flows beauteously in aspiration for the invisible 
kingdom of permanence, as this same Bruno, the No- 
lan, phrased it in verse : — 

While that the sun upon his round cloth burn 

And to their source the roving planets flee, 

Things of the earth do to the earth return 

And parted waters hasten to the sea : 

So shall my spirit to the high gods turn 

And heaven-born thought to Heaven shall carry me. 

Instead of being a cold pagan philosophy as it is 
frequently considered, reincarnation throbs with the 
most vital spirit of Christianity. It is no more Bud- 
dhism, than kindliness is Christianity. It is the hid- 
den core of the gospel of Jesus as of all other great 
religions and philosophies. This is what has pre- 
served them in spite of their degrading excrescences. 
It is " the religion of all sensible men " who refuse the 
weak sentiment and bigoted dogmas that obscure the 
light of Christianity in the churches : for it clearly 
unfolds what they unconsciously believe, in the laws 
of caufce and effect. It spurns the despairing doctrine 
of total depravity, but shows the cause of partial de- 
pravity. It teaches salvation as Jesus did, not by 



318 CONCLUSION. 

heaping our sins upon him, • but by recognizing the 
Fatherhood of the Supreme, entering the new birth 
into spiritual life, and watchfully growing Godward. 
It revolts against the thought of everlasting punish- 
ment for brief errors, but provides infinite opportu- 
nities for restoration and advancement, while em- 
phasizing most vigorously the unescapable results of 
all action. It is therefore a corrective of modern 
Christianity holding fast to the strength and beauty 
of what the Nazarene taught and lived, but including 
those very principles which breed religious skepticism 
in the extreme advocates of science and evolution. 
It enlarges Christianity to a grander capacity than it 
has hitherto known, and so furnishes at once an in- 
spiring religion for the loftiest spiritual aspiration, a 
most satisfactory philosophy for the intellect, and the 
strongest basis for practical nobility of conduct. 
There is no reason why reincarnation and Christian- 
ity should not grasp hands and magnificently advance 
together, each keeping the other steadfastly true. 
Only in this union can Christianity escape its present 
downward sag. Since western religion fails to 
spiritually sustain us and has largely gone over to the 
enemy, — materialism, it is time for another oriental 
tide to sweep over the West. Having already a par- 
tial possession here, reincarnation promises to flow in 
freely to revitalize Christianity, to spiritualize science. 
As Christianity has degenerated in the West, so has 
reincarnation in the East, and the hope of the race 
lies in an exalted marriage of them. They need each 
other, as husband and wife, allied in purest devotion, 
supplementing the defects and strengths of each other, 
and regenerating their lower unassociated tendencies. 
The religion of Jesus tends to sink into an irrational 



sentimentality which is commonly relegated to women 
and effeminate men. The spiritual philosophy of 
India declines into passionless fatalism or an ungen- 
erous self - absorption. Superstition darkens both 
alike. But reincarnation keeps Christianity thor- 
oughly rational, and Christianity will sustain reincar- 
nation in vigorous unselfishness. This alliance of the 
best truths of both hemispheres will teach a reveren- 
tial submission to the divine will without its sequel of 
stagnation, a heroic self-reliance without its danger of 
atheism, a regenerative communion with the Highest 
without the sacrilegious folly of selfish prayer. 

Reincarnation unites all the family of man into a uni- 
versal brotherhood more effectively than the prevailing 
humanity. It promotes the solidarity of mankind by 
destroying the barriers that conceit and circumstances 
have raised between individuals, groups, nations, 
and races. All are alike favored with perfect poetic 
justice. The children of God are not ordained some 
to honor and others to abasement. There are no 
special gifts. Physical blessings, mental talents, and 
moral successes are the laborious result of long merit. 
Sorrows, defects, and failures proceed from negligence. 
The upward road to the glories of spiritual perfection 
is always at our feet, with perpetual invitations and 
aids to travel higher. The downward way into sen- 
sual wreckage is but the other direction of the same 
way. We cannot despise those who are tending 
down, for who knows but we have journeyed that way 
ourselves ? It is impossible for us to scramble up 
alone, for our destiny is included in that of humanity, 
and only by helping others along can we ascend our- 
selves. The despondent sadness of the world which 
dims the lustre of every joy, chanting the minor key 



320 CONCLUSION. 

of nature, haunting us in unaccountable ways, cropping 
out in all literature and art, making the grandest of 
poetry tragic and the sublimest music sombre, is the 
unconscious voice of mankind, humming its keynote 
of life. While we continue to dwell in the murky 
realm of sense, that must prevail. But the bright rifts 
illuminating the advance guard herald the approach 
of day, and assure us that the trend of restless human 
gyrations is away from that condition. 

Contrary to the common opinion of eastern thought, 
reincarnation is optimistic. The law of causation is 
not a blind meting of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. 
It opens out into a scheme of beneficent progress. 
Science recognizes this in the vis medicatrix remedia 
naturce, the healing power of nature. What was 
once denied in the creed of the alchemists concerning 
the ascending impulse of all things is now preached 
by science, which declares in Tyndall's words that 
" matter contains within it the promise and potency of 
all life." All minerals have the rudimentary pos- 
sibility of plants and animals. Crystals strive after 
a higher life by assuming arborescent and mossy 
shapes. Plants display the embryonic qualities of low 
animals. No naturalist can mark infallibly the boun- 
daries of the three kingdoms, so closely are they inter- 
linked. A zoologist does not doubt the possibility of 
minerals becoming plants and these mounting into 
animals. The movement of vital energy is manward, 
and the cry of mankind is "excelsior," towards God. 
Poetry cherishes the same conviction 

that somehow good 
Shall be the final goal of ill, 
For pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt and taints of blood ; 



CONCLUSION, 321 

That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroyed 
Or cast as useless to the void 
When God shall make this pile complete. 

Behold ! we know not anything. 
We can but trust that good shall fall 
At last, far off, at last, to all, 
And every winter turn to spring. 

And Tennyson's uncertain faith is an undoubted verity 
in the Orient, thus phrased by Edwin Arnold : — 

Ye are not bound ! the soul of things is sweet, 

The heart of being is celestial rest ; 
Stronger than woe is will : that which was good 

Doth pass to better — best. 

Acknowledging that the forces of evil are terrific and 
multiply themselves prodigiously, there can be no ques- 
tion that the predominant powers are infinitely good. 
And the supremacy of good in the universe dimin- 
ishes the full force of evil, makes the higher attractions 
outvie the lower, and hastens the final disappearance 
of darkness. This insures the amelioration of all 
life by the benign process of re-birth ; for 

The Heart of all is a boundless Love 

Pulsing through every part 
In streams that thrill the hosts above 

And make the atoms dart. 

The strongest objection to reincarnation, our igno- 
rance of past lives, is met by the fact permeating all 
nature and experience, that progress depends upon 
forgetfulness. Every great stage of advancement is 
accompanied by the mental loss of earlier epochs. One 
of Montaigne's best essays shows the blessedness of 
defective memory. All deep philosophy agrees that 
after an experience is absorbed into the soul, its pur- 



322 CONCLUSION. 

pose is accomplished, and the only chance of improve- 
ment consists in " forgetting those things which are 
behind and reaching forth unto those things which are 
before." It would be intellectually impossible for the 
memory to grasp anything new, if it clung to all it 
had known. One of the grandest discourses of that 
greatest English preacher of the last generation, Fred- 
erick W. Kobertson, is upon the theme of " Chris- 
tian Progress by Oblivion of the Past." The experi- 
ence of the race affords no sufficient endorsement of 
the continuation of our mortal memories. It is im- 
possible to escape the liberal scientific teaching that 
the mind is only an instrument of the soul, and when 
it decays with the body, the soul retains of its earthly 
possessions only what has sunk down into the char- 
acter. The logician of the Scriptures expresses this 
in saying, " Whether there be knowledge it shall vanish 
away." But the everlastingness of character insures 
the permanence of our identity and of our dearest 
ties. And as the scale of being on earth shows a 
gradual development of memory from the lowest pro- 
tozoon to man, so in man the unconscious memory 
shall become more and more conspicuous, until it re- 
veals the course of our complete career. 

The glorious unfoldinent of our dormant powers in 
repeated lives presents a spectacle magnificent beyond 
appreciation, and approaches more grandly than any 
other conception to the sublimity of human develop- 
ment. Addison wrote : " There is not, in my opinion, 
a more pleasing consideration than that of the per- 
petual progress which the soul makes towards the per- 
fection of its nature, without ever arriving at a period 
in it. To look upon the soul as going on from strength 
to strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with 



CONCLUSION. 323 

new accessions of glory and brighten to all eternity ; 
that she will be still adding virtue to virtue and knowl- 
edge to knowledge, carries in it something wonder- 
fully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to 
the mind of man. Nay, it must be a prospect pleas- 
ing to God himself, to see his creatures forever beau- 
tifying in his eyes, and drawing nearer to Him by 
greater degrees of resemblance." Reincarnation shows 
the programme by which this stupendous scheme is 
being worked out, step by step, in the gradual method 
of all God's doings, and glorifies the present cycle as 
a specimen of eternity which shall ever grow brighter 
until the full brilliancy of the Highest shall radiate 
from every life. 

The practical application of this truth not only dis- 
pels the haunting enigmas of life, but incites us to 
the strongest habits of virtuous conduct in ourselves, 
and of generous helpfulness toward others. It in- 
spires us to nurture all the means of developing noble 
traits, since the promise of all good, and the only 
highway out of the bogs of physical life into the moun- 
tain heights of spirituality, is character. It reminds 
us most forcibly that 

Every thought of purity, 

Every deed of right, 
Conquers sin's obscurity, 

Speeds the reign of light ; 
Moves with might supernal 

Toward rest and home, 
Leads to life eternal, 

Prays, " Thy kingdom come." 

It is not strange, therefore, that one of the leading 
writers of Great Britain says of reincarnation : " The 
ethical leverage of the doctrine is immense. Its mo- 



324 CONCLUSION. 

tive power is great. It reveals as magnificent a back- 
ground to the present life, with its contradictions and 
disasters, as the prospect of immortality opens up an 
illimitable foreground, lengthening out the horizon 
of hope. It binds together the past and the present * 
and the future in one ethical series of causes and ef- 
fects, the inner thread of which is both personal to 
the individual and impersonal, connecting him with 
two eternities, one behind and the other before. With 
peculiar emphasis it proclaims the survival of moral 
individuality and personal identity along with the 
final adjustment of external conditions to the internal 
state of the agent." l 

Alongside of the Scotch professor's words we place 
these sentences from an eastern teacher, that the 
wisdom of the antipodes mny grasp hands in one com- 
mon brotherhood for the instruction of the world : — 

" There is in each incarnation but one birth, one 
life, one death. It is folly to duplicate these by per- 
sistent regrets for the past, by present cowardice, or 
fear of the future. There is no Time. It is Eter- 
nity's now that man mistakes for past, present, and 
future. 

" The forging of earthly chains is the occupation 
of the indifferent ; the awful duty of unloosing them 
through the sorrows of the heart is also their occupa- 
tion. 

" Liberate thj T self from evil actions by good ac- 
tions." 2 

Emerson, who unites in one personality the sub- 
limest intuitions of the Orient with the broadest ob- 
servations of the West, may well represent a noble 

1 Professor William Knight, 

2 An adept of India. 



CONCLUSION. 325 

harmony of these distant kinships when he says : 
" We must infer our destiny from the preparation. 
We are driven by instinct to hive innumerable ex- 
periences which are of no visible value, and we may 
revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate 
or exhaust them. Now there is nothing in nature 
capricious, or whimsical, or accidental, or unsup- 
ported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in 
steady and supported advances. ... If there is the 
desire to live, and in larger sphere, with more knowl- 
edge and power, it is because life and knowledge and 
power are good for us, and we are the natural deposi- 
taries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all 
proportion to the value set on a single day, and seems 
to indicate a conviction of immense resources and pos- 
sibilities proper to us, on which we have never drawn. 
All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide 
that I shall not have less in times and places than I 
do not yet know." 

We conclude, therefore, with the conviction that all 
the best teachers of mankind — religion, philosophy, 
science, and poetry — urge the soul to 

Be worthy of death ; and so learn to live 
That every incarnation of thy soul 
In varied realms, and worlds, and firmaments 
Shall be more pure and high. 



APPENDIX. 



» 



Where a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and 
courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the event by : it 
is good and made by a good workman. — De la Bruyere. 

You despise books : you whose whole lives are absorbed in the vani- 
ties of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence ; but re- 
member that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is 
governed by books. — Voltaire. 

Within their silent chambers treasures lie 
Preserved from age to age ; more precious far 
Than that accumulated store of gold 
And orient gems, which for a day of need 
The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs ; 
These hoards of truth you can unlock at will. 

Wordsworth. 

I not only commend the study of this literature (the eastern), but 
wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly enlarged. Ameri- 
can students may well derive from all former lands — all the older 
literatures and all the newer ones — bearing ourselves always cour- 
teous, always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the mothe'r- 
world, to all its nations dead, as all its nations living. 

Walt Whitman. 

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time — the articulate, 
audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of 
it has altogether vanished like a dream. No magic Rune is stranger 
than a book. All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been, is 
lying in magic preservation in the pages of books. Do not books still 
accomplish miracles as Runes were fabled to do ? They persuade 
men. — Carlyle. 



APPENDIX. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY OF REINCARNATION. 

I. Latin. 

Schilling, Wolfg. Heinrich. I)e Metempsychosi Dissertatio. 
Lipsise, 1679. 

Henrici, Heinrich. De Animarum Transmigratione. 1699. 

Haffner, Gotthard. Dissertatio de Transmigratione Anima- 
rum, quatenus ex Lumine Rationis cognosci potest. 1746. 

Osiander, Johann Adam. Dissertatio de Transmigratione 
Animarum Humanarum ex suis Corporibus in alia Corpora. Tu- 
bingae, 1749. 

Heusse, M. De Metempsychosi sive Animarum per plura 
Corpora Revolutione. 1757. 

Haeggroth, Nic. De Metempsychosi. London, 1793. 

Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van. Seder Olam sive Ordo 
Seculorum. Holland, 1693. 

Keil. De Pre-existentia Animarum. (In Opuscula.) 

Huygens, Christian. Cosmotheoros, sive de Terris Celestibus 
earumque Ornatu Conjecturse. Paris, 1698. 

Iamblichus. De Pythagorica Vita. Didot, 1862. 

Porphyrius. De Vita Pythagoras. Didot, 1862. 

Barrow, Isaac. Animse Humanse Corporibus non prseexistunt. 
(In opposition to Henry More.) (In his Opuscula, vol. iv. of 
his works.) London, 1687. 

Sibbern, Fred. C. De Prseexistentia, Genesi et Immortali- 
tate Animse. Havnise, 1823. 

Doppert, Joh. De vetusto Metempsycheos Commento. 
Schneebergse, 1716. 

Irhove, Willem. De Palingenesia Veterum seu Metemp- 
sychosi sic dicta Pythagorica Libri III. Amstelodami, 1733. 



330 APPENDIX. 

Wernsdorf, Gottlieb. Disputatio de Metempsychosi Veterum 
non figurate sed proprie intelligenda. Vitembergse, 1741. 

Vangerow, W. G. von. Dissertatio historico-philosophica Me- 
tempsychosin veterum sistens. Halle, 1765. 

Sedermark, Pet. De Metempsychosi Veterum. Pars I-III. 
Upsalse, 1807. 

Wendel, Job. And. De Metempsychosi nuper Denuo defensa. 
Coburgi, 1828. 

Sai an Sinsin sive Liber Metempsychosis veterum iEgyp- 
tiorum. E duabus Papyris funebribus hieraticis Signis exaratis 
nunc primum edidit Latine vertit Notas adjecit Henricus 
Brugsch. Berolini, 1851. 

Haupt, Eberh. Dav. De Metempsychosi sive Pythagorsea 
Animarum Transmigratione brevis Disquisition. Ulmse, 1724. 

Bruno, Giordano. De Triplice minimo et mensura ad trium 
speculatinarum seientiarum et multarum actinarum artium 
principia. Francoftirti, 1591. 

II. German. 

Bertram, J. F. Bescheidene Priifung der Meynung von der 
Praexistenz, oder dem Vorherseyn menschlicher Seelen in orga- 
nischen Leibern, sammt einer Historia Praeexistentianorum. 
Bremen, 1741. 

Schubert, Johann E. von. Wandelung der Seele nach dem 
Tode. Jena, 1746. 

Trinius, Joh. Anton. Abhandlung von der Seelenwanderung. 
Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1760. 

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Die Erziehung des Menschen- 
geschlechts. Berlin, 1780. Translated by Be v. Frederick W. 
Robertson. " The Education of the Human Race." London, 1855. 

Schlosser, Joh. Georg. Ueber die Seelenwanderung. Basel, 
1781. 

Beitrage zur Lehre der Seelenwanderung. Leipzig, 1785. 

Wasseljew, W. Der Buddhismus, seine Dogmen, Geschichte 
und Literatur. St. Petersburg, 1860. 

Koeppen, Carl Friedrich. Die Religion des Buddha und ihre 
Entstehung. Berlin, 1857. Die Lamaische Hierarchie und 
Kirche. Berlin, 1857. 

Herder, Joh. Gottfried von. Das Land der Seelen — Palinge- 
nesis — Ueber die Seelenwanderung. (Three Dialogues.) 1785. 



APPENDIX. 331 

(The Dialogue on Transmigration is translated by F. H. Hedge 
in his " Prose Writers of Germany." Philadelphia, 1848.) 

Bruch, J. Fr. Die Lehre von der Praexistenz der menschli- 
ehen Seelen historisch-kritisch dargestellt. Strassburg, 1859. 

Conzius, C. P. Schicksale der Seelenwanderungshypothese 
under verschiedenen Volkern und in verschiedenen Zeiten. 
Kbnigsberg, 1781. 

Leibnitz, G. W. Monadologie. 

Muller, Joh. T. Ueber die Seelenwanderung. Einige pru- 
fende Gedanken. Friedrichsstadt, 1785. 

Ungern-Sternberg, Chrn. F., Baron von. Bliek auf die mora- 
lisehe und politische Welt, was sie war, was sie ist, was sie seyn 
wird. Bremen, 1785. 

Grosse, Carl. Helim, oder uber die Seelenwanderung. Zit- 
tau, 1789. 

Wedekind, Georg, Baron von. Ueber die Bestimmung des 
Menschen und die Erziehung der Menschheit, oder : wer, wo, 
wozu, bin ich, war ich, und werde ich sein. Giessen, 1828. 

Ritgen, Ferd. Aug. von. Die hochsten Angelegenheiten der 
Seele, nach dem Gesetze des Fortschrittes betraehtet. Darm- 
stadt, 1835. 

Krug, Wilhelm Traugott. Der neue Pythagoras, oder Ge- 
schichte eines dreimal gebornen Erdenbiirgers. Leipzig, 1836. 

Meyer, Jiirgen Bona. Die Idee der Seelenwanderung. Ham- 
burg, 1861. A French translation, " De la migration des ames," 
is in the Revue Germanique, Nov. 30, 1861, XVIII. 239-259. 

Klewitz, A. W. von. Ueber Fortdauer und Prssexistenz. 
Magdeburg, 1789. 

Fichte, Joh. Gottlieb. Ideen liber Gott und Unsterblichkeit, 
als Nachtrag zu seinen " Sammtlichen Werken." 1853. 

Niirnberger, Jos. C. E. Still-Leben, oder iiber die Unsterb- 
lichkeit der Seele. Kempten, 1839. 

Meyer, Joh. Friedrich von. Priifung der Lehre von der See- 
lenwanderung. (In his Blatter fur hohere Wahrheit. Neue 
Folge, 1830, I. 244-299.) 

Fichte, Imman. Herm. Die Idee der Personlichkeit und der 
individuellen Fortdauer. Leipzig, 1855, 

Schubert, G. H. Die Geschichte der Seele. Stuttgart, 1833. 

Bastian, Adolf. Der Mensch in der Geschichte. See Vol. II. 
Psychologie und Mythologie. Leipzig, 1860. Die Vorstel- 
lungen von der Seele. Berlin, 1875. Der Mensch in der Ge« 



832 APPENDIX. 

schichte, 3 vols. Leipzig, 1866. Beitrage zur vergleichenden 
Psychologie. Berlin, 18o8. Weltauifassung der Buddhisten. 
Berlin, 1870. Der Buddliismus in seiner Psychologie. Berlin, 
1882. 

Midler. Lehre von der Siinde. Augsburg, 1854. See Vol. 
II. 495 et seq. 

Froschammer, J. Ueber den Ursprung der menschlichen 
Seelen. Miinchen, 1854. 

Marcus, Joh. Yorstellungen iiber den Ursprung der mensch- 
lichen Seelen in den ersten Jahren der Kirche. 1854. 

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Sainmtliche Werke. Die Welt als 
Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig, 1873. 

Fechner, Gustav Theodor. Ueber die Seelenfrage ; ein Gang 
durch die sichtbare Welt, uni die unsichtbare zu nnden. Leip- 
zig, 1861. 

Philo. Versuch eines systematischen Entwurfs des Lehrbe- 
griffs Philo's von Alexandrien. E. H. Stahl. Eichhorn's All- 
gem. Bibl. 1792. (IV. 767-890.) 

Seelenwanderung. Zeitschrift der Morgenland. Gesellschaft. 
VI., IX., XXVIL, XXIX. 

Kern. Der Buddliismus. Leipzig, 1882. 

Spiesz, E. Entwicklungsgeschichte der Vorstellungen vom 
Zustande nach dem Tode. Jena, 1877. (Contains a bibliog- 
raphy at the end of each chapter.) 

Miiller, J. G. Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligion. 
Basel, 1867. 

Simrock, K. Handbuch der Deutschen Mythologie. Bonn, 
1878. 

Pfleiderer, O. Religions-Philosophie. Berlin, 1878. 

Dollinger, J. J. I. Heidenthum und Judenthum. Begens- 
burg, 1857. 

Karsten, S. Verhandeling over Palingenesie en Metemp- 
sychosis. Amsterdam, 1846. 

Weber. Indische Studien. 

Twesten, C. Die reiigiosen, politischen und socialen Ideen 
der asiatischen Culturvolker. 2 vols. Berlin, 1872. 

Vierteljahrschrift fur die Seelenlehre. 

Delitzsch, Franz. System der Biblischen Psychologie. Leip- 
zig, 1855. 



APPENDIX, 333 

III. French. 

Olivier, Jean. La Metempsyehose, discours prononce par 
Pythagore dans Pecole de Crotone. Amsterdam et Paris, 1760. 

Duguet, Charles. Pythagore, ou Precis de philosophie an- 
cienne et moderne dans ses rapports avec les metamorphoses de 
la nature ou la metempsyehose. Paris, 1841. 

Reynaud, Jean. Philosophie Religieuse du Tierre et Ciel. 
Paris, 1854. 

Bouchet, Pere. Lettre sur la metempsyehose. In Picart's 
Ceremonies. Paris, 18.67. 

Erckmann-Chatrian. Le Docteur Malthdus. Paris, 1859. 

Linner, Jean R. Essai sur les Dogmes de la Metempsyehose 
et du Purgatoire enseigne par les Bramins de Plndostan. Berne, 
1771. 

Leroux, Pierre. De PHumanite. Paris. (See Fortnightly 
Review, V. 17, 1872, p. 324-333.) 

Beausobre, Isaac de. Histoire du Manicheisme. Paris. 

Bonnet, Charles. La Palingenesis Philosophique, ou Idees sur 
l'e'tat passd et sur Pe'tat futur des etres vivans. Geneve, 1769. 

Pezzani, Andre. La Pluralite des Existences de PAme. 
Paris, 1865. 

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouyer de. Entretiens sur la Plu- 
ralite des Mondes. Paris, 1686. Bibliotheque National. Paris, 
1871. 

Flammarion, Camille. La' Pluralite* des Mondes Habitue's. 
Paris, 1864. Histoires delnfinite'. Paris, 1867. Les Mondes, 
Imaginaires, et les Mondes Re*el. Paris, 1865. (Contains a list 
and analysis of all the works on the plurality of worlds.) 

Fourier, F. Charles Marie. La Fausse Industrie Morcelee, 
et P Antidote, PIndustrie Naturelle, combiue'e. Paris, 1835-36. 

Picart, Bernard. Ceremonies et coiitumes religieuses de tous 
les peuples du monde : 12 torn. Paris, 1807. 

Franck, Ad. Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques. 
Paris, 1875. See the article " Metempsyehose." 

Bibliotheque Orientale. Chef-d'oeuvre Littdraires de PInde, 
de la Perse, de PEgypte et de la Chine. Tomes 4. Paris, 
1872-78. Vol. I. Rig Yeda. II. Hymnes Sanscrit, Persans, 
Egyptiens, Assyriens et Chinois. III. Burnouf, E. Introduc- 

Grandville. Un Autre Monde, Transformations, Visions, In- 
cartations, etc. Paris, 1844. 

Balzac, Honore* de. Seraphita. Paris. 



334 APPENDIX. 

tion a l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien. IV. Le Koran Ana- 
lyse. 

Bibliotheque Orientale Elzevirienne. Tomes 30. Paris, 
1873-1880. (A vast collection of valuable works upon the 
religions, literatures, and peoples of the East.) 

Plotinus. Les Limeades de Plotin. Traduits pour la pre- 
miere fois en francais, accompagnee de sommaires, de notes — 
par M. N. Bouillet. Tomes 3. Paris, 1858-61. (With frag- 
ments from Porphyry, Iamblichus, and other Neo-Platonists.) 

Regnaud, P. Materiaux pour servir a l'histoire de la philo- 
sophic de lTnde. Paris, 1876. 

Draward, L. La Science Occulte. Paris. 

Burnouf, E. Introduction a l'histoire du Buddhisme Indien. 
Paris, 1844. Le Lotus de la Bonne Loi. Traduit du Sanscrit, 
accompagnee d'un Commentaire. Paris, 1852. 

IV. English. 

Cudworth, Ralph. The True Intellectual System of the Uni- 
verse. London, 1678. (" A storehouse of learning on the an- 
cient opinions of the nature, origin, pre-existence, transmigration, 
and future of the soul.") 

More, Henry. Philosophical Poems. " A Platonick Song of 
the Soul ; treating of the Life of the Soul, her Immortality, the 
Sleep of the Soul, the Unitie of Souls, and Memorie after 
Death." Cambridge, 1647. (See page 180, above.) 

More, Henry. The Immortality of the Soul, so farre as it is 
demonstrable from the knowledge of Nature and the Light of 
Reason. London, 1659. (See Book II, chapter xvi.) 

Glanvil, Joseph (Rector of Bath). Lux Orientalis ; or an 
Inquiry into the opinions of the Eastern sages concerning the 
Prse-existence of Souls. Being a key to unlock the Grand Mys- 
teries of Providence in Relation to man's sin and misery. Lon- 
don, 1662. Republished with annotations by Dr. Henry More. 
1682. 

Dunton, John. The Visions of the Soul before it comes into 
the Body. In several Dialogues. London, 1692. (Satirical.) 

Helmont, F. M. Two Hundred Queries moderately Pro- 
pounded concerning the Doctrine of the Revolution of Human 
Souls. London, 1684. 

Parker, Samuel (Bishop). A Free and Impartial Censure of 



APPENDIX. 335 

the Platonick Philosophie ; with an account of the Origenian 
Hypothesis, concerning the Pre-existence of Souls. London, 1666. 

Evidence (An) for Immortality, and for Transmigration. To 
which is added a Treatise concerning those who sleep in the 
Dust of the Earth. London, 1732. 

Mede. The Mystery of Godliness. London, 1708. (Chapter 
III upholds " the reasonable doctrine " of pre-existence as " a 
key for some of the main mysteries of Providence, which no 
other can so handsomely unlock.") 

Warren, Edward. No Pre-Existence ; or a brief Dissertation 
against the Hypothesis of Humane Souls living in a state ante- 
cedaneous to this. London, 1667. 

Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. London. See Nos. 211 
and 343. 

Newcomb, Thomas. Pre-existence and Transmigration. A 
Poem. London, 1743. 

Pre-existence. A Poem. Bath, 1763. (In Dodsley's Collec- 
tion, I. pp. 158-172.) (See pp. 181-187, above.) 

Berrow, Capel, Rector of Rossington. A Lapse of Human 
Souls in a State of Pre-existence, the only Original Sin, and the 
Groundwork of the Gospel Dispensation. London, 1766. 

(He considers that men are apostate angels, and that the 
brute creation labors under a severer stroke of divine justice 
than the human race because it was guiltier than mankind in 
reons past.) 

Jenyns, Soame. Disquisitions on Several Subjects. London, 
1782. Disq. Ill, pp. 27-46. (See page 87, above.) 

Preexistence of Souls and Universal Restoration. From the 
Minutes and Correspondence of the Burnam Society. Taunton, 
1798. 

Ramsay, Chevalier. Philosophical Principles of Natural and 
Revealed Religion unfolded in a Geometrical Order. Edin- 
burgh, 1748. 

Brocklesby, Richard. An Explication of Gospel Theism and 
the Divinity of the Christian Religion, containing the true ac- 
count of the System of the Universe. 1706. 

(Maintains preexistence.) 

Goodwin, John. Works. London, 1652. 

(Defends preexistence.) 

Bulstrode, Whitelocke. An Essay on Transmigration, in 
Defence of Pythagoras. London, 1692. 



336 APPENDIX. 

Wheeler, J. T. History of India. London, 1874. (For 
Hindu Transmigration, see pp. 72-76.) 

Garrett, J. Classical Dictionary of India. 1871. (See 
" Transmigration," on pp. 637-642.) 

Tulloch, John, D.D. Rational Theology and Christian Phi- 
losophy in England in the 17th Century. Edinburgh and Lon- 
don, 1872. (Vol. II : The Cambridge Platonists.) 

Wilkinson, Sir John Gardiner. A second series of the Man- 
ners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, including their Re- 
ligion, etc. 3 vols. London, 1878. (Vol. II. chap, xvi., pp. 
440-451, relate to transmigration.) 

Bunsen, Christian Carl J. Egypt's Place in Universal His- 
tory. 5 vols. London, 1848-1860. (Vol. IV. pp. 638-653, 
treat of animal worship and metempsychosis.) 

Ginsburg, Dr. The Kabbala : its Doctrines, Development 
and Literature. London. 

Taylor, Isaac. Physical Theory of Another Life. London 
and New York, 1836. 

Hume, David. Essay on Immortality. In his Essays, moral, 
political and literary. Edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Gosse. 
London, 1875. (See p. 94, above.) 

Cox, Edward W. What am I ? A Popular Introduction to 
Mental Philosophy and Psychology. 2 vols. London, 1871. 
Vol. I., chap. 42, "Pre-existence." 

Hudson, C. F. Debt and Grace, as related to the Doctrine of 
a Future Life. Boston, 1858. (See p. 111.) 

Timbs, John. The Mysteries of Life, Death and Futurity. 
London, 1880. (See the chapters on Pre-existence of Souls, pp. 
43 and 262.) 

Butler, Wm. Archer. Lectures on the History of Ancient 
Philosophy, edited by William Hepworth Thompson. London, 
1856. (See Vol. II., Lecture IV., pp. 240-264, Psychology of 
Plato.) 

Mozley, J. B., D.D. (Canon of Christ Church). Essays, His- 
torical and Theological. London, 1878. (Vol. II. pp. 317 sq., 
"Indian Conversion," severely attacks the Brahmanical doc- 
trine.) 

Liddon, H. P., D.D. (Canon of St. Paul's). Some Elements 
of Religion. Lent Lectures. London, 1870. (Lecture II. pp. 
95-106, is devoted to a refutation of Preexistence.) 

Jennings, H. The Rosecrucians. Their Rites and Mysteries. 



APPENDIX. 337 

London, 1870. (References to transmigration occur on pages 
94, 97, 101, 106.) 

Davies, Edward. Mythology and Rites of the British 
Druids. London, 1809. 

Mosheim, Joli. L. von. Commentaries on the Affairs of the 
Christians in the First Three Centuries. London and New 
York. (See Sections 27-29 for Origen.) 

Beecher, Edward. The Conflict of Ages ; or the Great De- 
bate on the Moral Relations of God and Man. Boston, 1853. 
The Concord of Ages. New York, 1860. 

Alger, Wm. R. A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Fu- 
ture Life. Philadelphia, 1860. (See p, 100, above.) 

Clarke, James Freeman. Ten Great Religions. Boston, 
1871. (Vol. I. chapter iii. Brahmanism ; chap. iv. Buddhism ; 
chap. vi. The Religion of Egypt. Vol. II. cha,p. vi. The Soul 
and its Transmigrations in all Religions.; 

Johnson, Samuel. Oriental Races and Religions. India. 
Boston, 1875. 

Channing, Wm. Henry. Lectures on Eastern Religions. 
London. 

Haldred. An Account of the Hindoo Land. 

D' Israeli, Isaac. Curiosities of Literature. London. (Vol. 
II. contains a short section on "Metempsychosis." ) 

Hardy, R. Spence. A Manual of Buddhism, in its Modern 
Development. London, 1853. New York, 1886. 

Wilson, Prof. H. H. Lectures on the Religious Opinions of 
the Hindus. 

Upham, Edward. The History and Doctrine of Buddhism, 
popularly illustrated. London, 1829. (Transmigration occupies 
pp. 25-43.) 

Lillie, Arthur. Buddha aud Early Buddhism. 

Brewster, David. More Worlds than One : the Philosopher's 
Faith and the Christian's Hope. London. 

Man : Fragments of Forgotten History. By Two Chelas. 
London, 1885. 

Hartmann, Franz, M.D. Magic, White and Black ; or the 
Science of the Finite and Infinite Life. London, 1886. 

Simiet, A. P. Esoteric Buddhism. Boston, 1884. 

Five Years of Theosophy. London, 1885. 

Arnold, Edwin. The Light of Asia. Boston, 1879. Pearls 
of the Faith. Boston, 1883. 



338 APPENDIX. 

Collins, Mabel. Light on the Path. Boston, 1885. Through 
the Gates of Gold. A Fragment of Thought. Boston, 1887. 

Tredwell, Daniel N. Apollonius of Tyana. New York, 1886. 

Chasseaud, Geo. Washington. The Druses of the Lebanon : 
their Manners, Customs, and History. With a translation of 
their Religious Code. London, 1855. 

Fleming's Vocabulary of Philosophy. London, 1886. (See 
under Metempsychosis, etc.) 

Hedge, Frederick Henry. Ways of the Spirit and other Es- 
says. Boston, 1877. (See above, page 120.) 

Tyler, E. B. Primitive Culture. New York, 1876. 

Myers, F. W. H. Modern Essays. (See page 55.) 

Poe, Edgar Allan. Eureka. In his Complete Works. New 
York. 

Smedley. The Occult Sciences. London, 1855. Dream- 
land and Ghostland. 3 vols. London, 1887. 

Hodson, B. H. Essays on the Language, Literature and Re- 
ligion of Nepal and Tibet. London, 1874. 

King, C. W. The Gnostics and their Remains, Ancient and 
Medieval. London and New York, 1864 and 1887. 

McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological 
and Ecclesiastical Literature. New York, 1867-1877. (See 
Gnostics, Metempsychosis, Pre-existence, Origen, etc.) 

Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled : A Master Key to the 
Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. New 
York, 1877. (See references in index to Metempsychosis, Rein- 
carnation and Transmigration.) 

Frith, J. Life of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan. London and 
Boston, 1887. 

Meyer, Isaac. Qabbalah. The Philosophical Writings of 
Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol or Avicebron, and their con- 
nection with the Hebrew Qabbalah and Sepher haz-Zohar, etc. 
Philadelphia, 1888. 

V. English. (Translations.) 

Manu, The Institutes of. The Twelfth Book treats of 
Transmigration. Trans, by Sir Wm. Jones. Yol. VIII. of his 
Works. 1807. 

Rig Veda. Vishnu Purana. Translated by Prof. H. H. Wil- 
son. London^ 1840. 



APPENDIX. 389 

Sacred Books of the East. Translated or edited by Max 
Miiller. Oxford. See especially Upanishads, Vol. I. ; Sacred 
Laws of the Aryas, Vol. II. ; Bhagavadgita, Vol. VIII. 

Picart, Bernard. Ceremonies and Religious Customs of all 
the People of the World. 6 vols. London, 1733-37. Vol. IV. 
Part II. pp. 159-187, describe Hindu Transmigration. See 
also Vol. I. Part II. p. 23 seq.; Vol. II. Part I. p. 157 seq. 

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadology. Trans, by F. H. 
Hedge. In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. I. pp. 
129. New York, 1867. 

Hafiz. Persian Lyrics. London, 1800. 

Bibliotheque Orientale. London, 1692. (See the essay on 
Transmigration.) 

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. The Education of the Race. 
Trans, by Rev. F. W. Robertson. London, 1855. 

Fichte, J. G. The Destiny of Man. In Dr. Hedge's " Prose 
Writers of Germany." Philadelphia, 1848. New York, 1856. 
(See pages 58-59, above.) 

Helmont, F. M. von. Seder Olam : or the Order of All the 
Ages of the Whole World ; also the Hypothesis of the Pre-exist- 
ency and Revolution of Human Souls. Translated by J. Clark, 
M.D. London, 1694. 

Herder, John. Dialogues on Transmigration. Translated 
by F. H. Hedge in his " Prose Writers of Germany " (pp. 248 et 
seq.). Philadelphia, 1848. New York, 1856. (See pp. 59-63, 
above.) 

Plotinus. Select Works. Translated by Thomas Taylor. 
London, 1817. Five Books. (See especially " The Descent of 
the Soul.") Translated by Thomas Taylor. London, 1794. 

Virgil. Eneid. Translated by William Morris. Boston, 
1876. Trans, by C. P. Cranch. Boston, 1872. (See latter 
part of the sixth Eneid.) 

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Pythagorean Philosophy. Trans- 
lated by Dry den. London and New York. 

Plato. Phsedro. Translated by B. Jowett. New York, 
1871. Also in Bonn's Classical Library. 

Plutarch. Essay on the Delay of Heavenly Justice. In his 
Miscellaneous Essays. London and New York. 

Origen, The Writings of. Translated by Rev. Frederick 
Crombie. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1869, In Clark's Ante-Nicene 
Christian Library. 



340 APPENDIX. 

Richter, Jean Paul. Levana. London, 1848. (p. 346.) 

Israel, Manasseh Ben. Conciliata. Translated by Dr. 
Linde. (A rich mine of information concerning the Kabala, 
and Jewish preexisteuce.) 

Fourier, Charles. Passions of the Human Soul. Translated 
by Hugh Dougherty. London, 1851. (For Fourier's ideas on 
immortality see Introduction, pp. xiv-xviii.) 

Herodotus. Book II. cap. 123. 

Timseus, the Locrian. (A Pythagorean.) 

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Trans- 
lated by R. B. Haldane and I. Kemp. 3 vols. London, 1883- 
86. (See Vol. III. p. 468.) Essay on Death and Immortality. 
Translated by C. L. Bernays in the Journal of Speculative Phi- 
losophy, Vol. I. 1867. 

Talmud, The. J. Barclay. 1878. Selections from the Tal- 
mud. H. Polano. 1848. 

Figuer, Louis. The To-morrow of Death. Translated by S. 
R. Crocker. Boston, 1872. 

Bonnet, Charles. Philosophic Palingenesis. Paris. 

He», LJywarch. Heroic Elegies. Translated by Owen. 
(Welsh 1 oems of Druidism.) 

Diogenes Laertius. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philos- 
ophers of Antiquity. Translated by C. D. Yonge. In Bonn's 
Standard Library. London, 1853. (See Plato, Pythagoras, 
Empedocles, Hierocles.) 

Dacier, A. Life of Pythagoras, with his Symbols and Golden 
Verses. From the French. London, 1797. Hierocles, upon the 
Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans. Trans, by J. Moor. Glas- 
gow, 1756. Life of Pythagoras, with his Symbols and Golden 
Verses, together with the Life of Hierocles and his Commentaries 
upon the Verses. From the French. London, 1721. 

Miiller, Julius. Christian Doctrine of Sin. Trans, by Wm. 
Pulsford. In Clark's Foreign Theological Library. Edinburgh. 

Hagenbach, Karl R. History of Doctrine. Trans, by Carl 
W. Buch. In Clark's Foreign Theological Library. Edinburgh. 
(For Patristic Preexistence see pp. 143-, 285-.) New York, 1863. 

Schlegel, W. F. von. ^Esthetics and Miscellaneous Works. 
In Bohn's Library. 1849. (See p. 468.) 

Kuenen, A. National Religions and Universal Religions. 
(Hibbert Lectures, 1882.) Trans, by Rev. P. H. Wicksteed. 
New York, 1882. (Lecture V. is upon Buddhism.) 

Balzac, Honore' de. Seraphita. Translated, with an Introduc- 
tion, by George Frederic Parsons. New York, 1889. 



APPENDIX. 

Renouf, P. Le Page. The Religion of Ancient Egypt. ( 
bert Lectures for 1879.) New York, 1879. 

Grimm's Teutonic Mythology. See the article on Tran 
gration, Vol. II. pp. 6o5, 826. 

Oldenberg, Hermann. Buddha, his Life, his Doctrine, 
Order. Translated by William Hoey. London, 1882. 

Buddhist Birth Stories. Edited by Faurboel. Translatec 
Rhys David. 

VI. Fiction. 

Rossetti, D. G. St. Agnes of Intercession. An autobiogr 
ical story. In Rossetti's Collected Works. London. (Vo 
p. 399.) 

Willis, N. P. A Revelation of a Previous Life. An aut( 
graphical sketch. In his " Dashes at Life." New York, 1 

Macnish, R. The Metempsychosis by a Modern Pyth 
rean. In Tales, Essays, and Sketches. London, 1844. Ah 
Blackwood's Magazine, XIX. 496; Littell, LVII. p. I ■ 
Tales from Blackwood, Vol. II. ; Good Stories, Part II. 

Confessions of a Metempsychosian. Eraser's Magazine, I - 
496. 

Cooke, Rose Terry. Metempsychosis. Atlantic Monthly, | 
59. 

Fielding, Henry. A Journey from this World to the IS 
In his Complete Works. London. 

Sinnet, A. P. Karma. Boston, 1886. 

Hogg, James. The Wool Gatherer. In his Winter Eve] 
Tales. Glasgow. 

Stevenson, R. L. The Adventures of Dr. Jekyl and 
Hyde. New York, 1887. 

Hawthorne, Julian. Archibald Malmaison. New York, 1 

Flammarion, Camille. Stories of Infinity. Trans, by S 
Crocker. Boston, 1873. 

Barrett, Wendell. Duchess Emilia. Boston, 1887. 

Hunt, Mrs. E. B. The Wards of Plotinus. London 
New York, 1881. (In this historical novel Plotinus and the £ 
Platonists of his time are the principal figures, though not m 
of their philosophy of preexistence appears.) 

Balzac, Honore' de. Peau de Chagrin. Paris, 1839. 

Erckman, E., and Chatrian, A. LTllustre Docteur Math- 
Paris, 1859. 

Atherton, Mrs. G. W. What Dreams may Come. I 
York, 1888. 

An Unlaid Ghost. A Study in Metempsychosis. (Anc 
mous.) New York, 1888. 



r 



APPENDIX. 

;chner, Gustav T. Dr. Mises. Leipzig. 
?hese stories of doubles may also be added, as showing more 
ss the impersonation of the higher and lower self in separate 
odiments : ) 

>uque\ Sintram and his Companion, 
idersen, Hans C. The Shadow, 
owning, Mrs. E. B. The Romaunt of Margret. 
mtier. Le Chevalier Double, 
lie, E. E. My Double and How he undid me. 
>e, E. A. William Wilson. 



VII. Articles in Periodicals, Pamphlets, etc. 

>wen, Prof. Francis. Cliristian Metempsychosis. Prince- 
review, New Series, VII. 315. (May, 1881.) 
ger, Wm. R. The Transmigration of Souls. North Amer- 
Review, LXXX. 58. (January, 1855.) 
anvil, Joseph, wrote a long letter full of curious learning to 
ard Baxter, in defense of the soul's preexistence, which is 
ig the Baxter MSS. in the Red-Cross Street Library, 
plegate. 

ntiment of Pre-existence. Chamber's Journal. (May 17, 
3ct. 11, 1845.) 

>ctrine of Pre-existence. The Radical, III. 517. 
e-existence of Souls. American Presbyterian Review, II. 

(March, 1854.) 
light, Prof. William. Doctrine of Metempsychosis. Fort- 
;ly Review, XXX. 422. (See p. 96, above.) 
nidus, J. W. Transmigration of Souls. Reformed Quar- 
Review, XXVIII. 625. 

e-existence of Souls. Bibliotheca S acra, XII. (Jan., 1855.) 
i Keil's Opuscula Acad, 
e-existence. Methodist Review, Oct., 1853. 
ncerning Preexistence. Penn Monthly, VIII. 655. Sept., 

ist, Dr. Bishop of Dromore. A Letter of Resolutions con- 
ng Origen and the Chief of his Opinions. Republished in 
ollection of Tracts called the Phcenix. 

iphant, Lawrence. The Land of Gilead. A Remarkable 
ative of a Child who remembered previous Lives. Black- 
's Magazine, Vol. CXXIX. Jan., 1881. 



APPENDIX. 343 

Pythagoras. University Magazine. Sept., 1879. 

Preexistence. Notes and Queries. Second Series, Vol. II. 
453, 517 ; III. 50-52, 132 ; IV. 157, 234, 298 ; V. 303 ; VII. 
319 ; XI. 341-343. 

Transactions of the London Lodge of the Theosophical So- 
ciety, No. 5. A paper on Reincarnation by Miss Anundale* 
with comments by Mohini M. Chatterji. London, 1886. 

Sense of Preexistence. Littell's Living Age, LIV. 222. 

Metempsy chose chez les Babis. Journal Asiatique, VIII. 
488. 

Metempsychose chez les Tibetains. Journal Asiatique, XIV. 
409. 

jr 

VIII. Philosophical and Theosophical Magazines. 

The Path. Edited by W. Q. Judge. New York. 

The Theosophist. Ed. by H. P. Blavatsky. Adyar, India. 

Lucifer. Ed. by Mabel Collins and.H. P. Blavatsky. Lon- 
don. 

The Occult World. Ed. by Mrs. J. W. Cables. Rochester, 
N. Y. 

The Religio- Philosophical Journal. Chicago, 111. 

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. New York. 

Journal des Savants. Paris. 

La Revue Philosophique. Paris. 

Journal Asiatique. Paris. 

Revue de l'Histoire des Religions. Edited by Jean Reville. 
Paris. 

Le Lotus. Ed. by K. Gaboriaux. Paris. 

Les Jours Nouveaux. Ed. by Duchess de Poma. Paris. 

L'Aurore. Paris. 

Die Sphinx. Hiibbe-Schleden. Munich. 

Zeitschrift filr Philosophic und philosophische Kritik. Dr 
Krohn und Rich. Falckenberg. Halle. 

Jamai-ul-Uloom. Urdu. India. 

Ary a Magazine. Lahore, India. 

The Occult Magazine. Glasgow. 

The Platonist. Edited by Thomas M. Johnson, Osceola, Mo. 



INDEX. 



[Including authors in the Appendix.] 



Addison, Joseph, 153, 276, 322, 335. 

Adept, quotation from an, 324. 

Adepts, 264. 

African transmigration, 276. 

Aldrich, T. B., poems by, 134, 136. 

Alexander the Great, 5, 197. 

Alf ord, Dean, poem by, 148. 

Alger, Win. R., 100, 337, 342. 

Alternate consciousness, 54. 

American poets, 129-145. 

Ammonius Saccas, 229. 

Analogy favoring reincarnation, 22. 

Andersen, Hans C, 342. 

Anecdotes, 36-46. 

Anonymous quotations, 10, 23, 224, 321, 

323' 325. 
Apoll'onius of Tyana, 39, 76, 243, 338. 
Appendix, 329-343. 
Arguments for reincarnation, 20-48, 88, 

103. 
Aristobulus, 210. 
Aristotle, 81. 
Arnobius, 223. 
Arnold, Edwin, 126, 240, 250, 252, 256, 

262, 298, 303, 321, 337. 
Arnold, Matthew, 168. 
Ashton, Eugene, 42. 
Astronomical reincarnation, 66. 
Atomic hypothesis, 247, 284. 
Atoms, transmigration of, 284, 285. 
Augustine, 236. 
Augustinian original sin, 32. 

Bacchic processions, 6. 
Bailey, Philip T., 153, 288, 308. 
Balzac, H., 341. 
Barrow, Isaac, 329. 
Basilidians, 72. 
Bastian, A., 331. 
Beaumont and Fletcher, 298. 
Beausobre, I., 333. 
Bede, 17. 

Beecher, Edward, 7, 35, 47, 67, 337. 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 67, 298. 
Berrow, Capel, 335. 
Bertram, J. F., 330. 

Beyond, poem by J. T. Trowbridge, 141. 
Bhagavadgita, 10, 339. 
Bible, The, and reincarnation, 34, 72, 83, 
113, 114, 214-221. 



Bibliography of reincarnation, 829-343. 

Bibliotheque Orientale, 334. 

Bjornsen's poem " Salme," 169. 

Blake, Wm., 94. 

Blavatsky, H. P., 338, 343. 

Bode, 66. 

Boehme, Jacob, 7, 65. 

Boethius, 81, 272. 

Bogomiles, 227. 

Bonaventura, 65. 

Bonds of action, 301. 

Bonnet, Charles, 333, 340. 

Boullier, 27. 

Bowen, Prof. Francis X., 34, 42, 67, 102. 

Boyesen, H. H., 170. 

Brahman, a, upon transmigration, 284. 

Brahman reincarnation, 195, 241, 243- 

245, 274. 
Brahmans, the, 6, 80, 87. 
Brewster, David, 7, 66, 337. 
British poets, 146-168. 
Brocklesby, Richard, 335. 
Brodie's psychological inquiries, 54. 
Brooks, Phillips, 67. 
Browne, Sir Thomas. 16, 67, 82, 272. 
Browning, E. B., 126, 342. 
Browning, Robert, 155, 298. 
Bruno, Giordano, 7, 65, 169, 229, 330, 

338 ; quoted, 27, 317. 
Bruch, J. F., 331. 
Bruyere, De la, 288, 328. 
Buckle's History of Civilization, 31. 
Buddhism, 69, 70, 196, 242-247, 274. 
Bulstrode, W., 335. 
Bulwer-Lytton, 37, 97, 126. 
Bunsen, C. J., 336. 
Burnouf, E., 334. 
Butler, Wm. Archer, 50, 96, 209, 336. 

Cabala, 6, 80, 211, 336, 338, 340. 

Caesar, Julius, 5. 

Cardan, 81. 

Cambridge Platonists, 6, 65, 179. 

Campanella, T., 65, 177. 

Carlyle, T., ii, 308, 328. 

Carpenter's Mental Physiology, 54, 

Cathari, 227. 

Cato, 228. 

Cebes, 81, 104. 

Channing, W. H., 337. 



346 



INDEX. 



Chapman, George, ii. 

Chasseaud, G. W., 338. 

Children, 33, 40, 77. 

Christian metempsychosis (Prof. F. 

Bowen), 103. 
Christianity teaching reincarnation, 72, 

225, 227. 
Christianity married to reincarnation, 

317. 
Christina (Robert Browning), 155. 
Church fathers, 6, 86, 87, 22G, 232, 275. 
Cicero, 81. 
Clarke, James Freeman, x, G7, 97, 210, 

337. 
Clemens Alexandrinus, 22G, 232. 
Coleridge, S. T., 35, 54, 156, 229. 
Collins, Mabel, 338. 
Collins, Mortimer, 168. 
Concord of Ages (Dr. Beecher), 47, 6T. 
Concord of Ages (Dr. Beecher), 47, 67. 
Conflict of Ages (Dr. Beecher), 47, 67. 
Continental poets, 168-177. 
Conzius, C. P., 331. 
Cooke, Rose T., 341. 
Cox, E. W., 336. 
Crookes, Prof., 4. 
Cudworth, Ralph, 20, G5, 334. 
Dacier's Life of Pythagoras, 282, 340. 
Damascius, 229. 
Davies, E., 337. 
Davy, Sir Humphry, 123. 
De Profundis (Tennyson), 151. 
Death, 289-296. 

Death in Esoteric Orientalism, 269. 
Death, Prof. Bowen on, 116. 
Death, Schopenhauer on, 67. 
Death, The Secret of (Sanskrit poem), 

252. 
Delitzsch, 216, 226, 332. 
Denton's Soul of Things, 284. 
Descent of the Soul (Plotinus), 229. 
Destiny of Man (Fichte), 74. 
Disraeli, Benjamin, 298. 
D'Israeli, Isaac, 10, 337. 
Dialogues on Metempsychosis (Herder), 

75. 
Dickens, Charles, 41. 
Diogenes Laertius, 340. 
Disquisition on a Praeexistent State 

(Jenyns), 87. 
Dollinger, J. J. I., 332. 
Donne, Dr., 168. 
Doppert, J., 329. 
Dorner, Dr., 7, 47, 66. 
Dowden's Life of Shelley, 92. 
Dravard, L., 334. 

Dream of Pythagoras (E. Tatham), 156. 
Druids, 5, 6, 71, 275, 337. 
Druses, 39, 276. 
Duchess, The, 341. 
Duguet, C, 333. 
Dunton, John, 334. 
Dupont de Nemours, 97. 
Du Prel, Baron, 54. 

Eastern poetry, 251-260. 
Eastern reincarnation, 7, 240. 
Ebers, George, 282. 



Edda, 71. 

Education of the Human Race (Lessing), 

72. 
Egypt, 5, 80, 197. 
Eleusinian mysteries, 6. 
Emerson, R. W., 7, 16, 23, 98, 126, 178, 

190, 214, 229, 277, 298, 312, 324. 
Empedocles, 5. 
English divines, 6, 67. 
English books upon reincarnation, 334- 

338. 
Enoch, 269, 291. 
Erckmann-Chatrian, 333, 341. 
Erigena, 65. 
Ernesti, 7. 

Esoteric Oriental reincarnation, 263-270. 
Essenes, 210. 
Euclid, 81. 
Euripides, 81. 
Evidences of reincarnation, 15-48, 88, 

103. 
Evil, origin of, 32, 85, 116. 
Evolution, 4, 19, 24. 
Experiences requiring reincarnation, 36- 

4G. 

Facing Westward (W. Whitman), 143. 

Fawcett, Edgar, 31. 

Fechner, G. T., 21, 332, 342. 

Fernelius, J., 81. 

Fichte, I. H., 65, 74, 331. 

Fichte, J. G., 331, 339. 

Fielding, H., 341. 

Fiquier, Louis, 7, 340. 

Final Thought, The (M. Thompson), 

139. 
Flammarion, C, 7, 66, 341. 
Fleury, 338. 
Folk-lore, 276. 
Fontenelle, 66. 
Fouque\ 342. 
Fourier, 66, 340. 

French books upon reincarnation, 333. 
Frith, J., 338. 
Froschammer, J. , 26, 332. 
Future punishments, 35. 

Galen, 81. 

Garrett, J., 336. 

Gauls, 5. 

Gates Between, The (E. S. Phelps), 

292. 
Gautama, 298. 
Gautier, 342. 
Gazzali, 308. 
Genius explained by reincarnation, 59, 

314. 
German books upon reincarnation, 330- 

332. 
Ginsburg, Dr., 336. 
Glanvil, Joseph, 66, 91, 214, 334, 342. 
Gnostics, 6, 72, 226, 227. 
Goethe, 7, 175. 

Golden verses of Pythagoras, 281. 
Goodwin, J., 335. 
Gosse, Edmund W., 146. 
Greek philosophers, 20, 200, 201, 226. 
Grimm, 341. 



INDEX. 



347 



Grosse, C, 331. 
Gymnosophists, 5, 80, 87, 196. 

Haeggroth, Nic, 329. 

Haffner, G., 329. 

Hafiz, 259, 339. 

Hagenbach, K. A., 340. 

Haldred, 337. 

Hale, E. E., 342. 

Hardy, R. S., 246, 337. 

Hartmann, F., 10, 337. 

Haupt, E. D., 330. 

Hawthorne, Julian, 55, 341. 

Hayne, Paul H., 129. 291. 

Heaven and Hell, 288. 

Hedge, F. H., x, 120, 331, 338, 339. 

Hegel, 65. 

Helmont, F. M., 65, 329, 334, 339. 

Hen, L., 340. 

Henrici, H., 329. 

Herder, J. G., 7, 65, 75, 330, 339. 

Heredity, 58. 

Heretics advocating reincaruation, 72, 

225. 
Herodotus, 197, 340. 
Heusse, M., 329. 
Hewlett, H. G. (Sonnet), vi. 
Hierocles, 46, 229, 281. 
Hilarius, 236. 
Hindu reincarnation, 7, 39, 246. See 

Brahmanism and Buddhism. 
Hippocrates, 81. 
Hddge, Dr., 34. 
Hodson, B. H., 338. 
Hofmann, Josef, 313. 
Hogg, James, 41, 92, 341. 
Holmes, O. W., 126. 
Hone, William, 38. 
Horace, 126. 
Houghton, Lord, 150. 
Hudson, C. F., 336. 
Hugo, Victor, 171. 
Hume, David, 16. 65, 71, 94, 336. 
Hunt, E. B., 341.' 
Hunt, Helen, 288. 
Huygens, C., 66, 329. 
Hymns, 190, 191. 

Iarchas, 76. 

Identity (T. B. Aldrich), 13G. 
Identity of the soul, 29, 113. 
Immortality and reincarnation, 20, 226. 
Immortality, Emerson on, 325. 
Immortality, Hume on, 94. 
Immortality, Schopenhauer, 65. 
Immortality of the Soul (Dr. More), 67. 
Innate ideas, 31. 
India, 5, 240. 

Injustice of reincarnation, 57. 
Intimations of Immortality (Words- 
worth), 146. 
Introduction, 3. 
Irhove, Wm., 329. 
Isis, rites of, 6. 
Israel, M. B., 340. 

Jamblichus, 81, 229, 282, 329. 



Jennings, H., 336. 

Jenyns, Soame, 34, 64, 66, 87, 335. 

Jerome, 224, 225, 236. 

Jesus, 6, 18, 84, 112, 218. 

Jewish preexistence, 210, 340. 

Jews, 6, 72. 

John the Baptist, 6, 114, 218. 

Johnson, Samuel, 337. 

Jones, Sir W., 338. 

Josephus, 210, 217. 

Judgment day, 302. 

Justin Martyr, 232. 

Kabala. See Cabala. 

Kalidesa, 251, 278. 

Kant, Em., 7, 35, 65, 66, 109, 300. 

Karma, 299. 

Karsten, S.,332. 

Katha Upanishad, 252. 

Keil, C. A. G., 329, 342. 

Kemble, Frances A., 308. 

Kern, 332. 

Kindness of the Orient toward animals, 

279. 
King,*C. W.,338. 
King, Dr. William, 277. 
Klewitz, A. W., 331. 
Knight, William X.,10, 50, 52, 67,95, 

323, 342. 
Koeppen, C. F., 330. 
Krug, W. T.,331. 
Kuenen, A., 340. 

Lancaster, A. E., 312. 

Landon, L. E., 133. 

Larcom, Lucy, 310. 

Later books on reincarnation, 329, 330. 

Law, William, 64, 66. 

Law of Causation, 299. 

Laws of Manu, 245, 272, 273, 275, 338. 

Leaves of Grass (W. Whitman), 144. 

Lecky's European Morals, 279. 

Leibnitz, 7, 54, 65, 108, 331, 339. 

Leland, C. G., 137. 

Leroux, P., 66, 333. 

Lessing, 7, 35, 72, 65, 71, 72, 330, 339. 

Lewes, George Henry, 31. 

Ley den, Dr., 156. 

Lichtenberg, 71. 

Liddon, H. P., 336. 

Light of Asia, 126, 240, 256, 262, 298, 

303 339. 
Light on the Path (Collins), 264, 338. 
Lillie, A., 337. 
Lindsay, Lord, 41. 
Linner, J. R., 333. 
Longfellow, H. W., 142, 288. 
Lotze, Hermann, yii, 26. 
Lowell, J. R., 142. 
Lux Orientalis (Glanvil), 91, 334. 

Macdonald, George, 50. 

Macnish, R., 341. 

Magazines, philosophical and theosoph- 

ical, 343. 
Magi, 5, 80, 87. 
Mahatmas, 264. 



348 



INDEX. 



Man : Fragments of Forgotten History, 

264 337. 
Manichaeans, 6, 72, 225, 226, 227. 
Manu, laws of, 245, 272, 273, 275, 338. 
Marcionists, 72. 
Marcus, J., 332. 
Marvell, Andrew, 167. 
Materialism, ix, 19. 
Mazzini, 308. 

McClintock and Strong, 338. 
Mede, 335. 

Memory of past lives, 51. 
Memory, On (Tupper), 154. 
Metempsychosis. See Reincarnation. 
Metempsychosis, Dialogues on (Herder), 

75. 
Metempsychosis of the Pine (Bayard 

Taylor), 131. 
Metempsychosis, The (T. B. Aldrich), 

134. 
Mexico, 6, 276. 
Meyer, I., 338. 
Meyer, J. B., 331. 
Meyer, J. F., 331. 
Michelet, 272. 
Miller, J. G., 332. 
Milnes, R. M., 150, 250. 
Milton, 16, 180, 181. 
Mohammedan reincarnation, 6, 71, 247. 
Montaigne, 321. 
Moore, Thomas, 194. 
More, Dr. Henry, 6, 34, 64, 65, 78, 179, 

180, 334, 340. 
Mosheim, J. L., 337. 
Mozley, J. B.,330. 
Mulford, Elisha, 26. 
Miiller, 332. 

Miiller, Julius, 7, 35, 47, 66. 
Miiller, J. T., 331. 
Miiller, Max, 339. 
Mulock, D. M., vi. 
Myers, F. W. H., 338. 
Mysteries, Eleusinian, 6. 
Mystic, The (P. J. Bailey), 153. 

Nature of the soul requires reincarna- 
tion, 29, 120. 

Nemesis, 302. 
Nemesius, 226, 236. 
Neo-Platonism, 5, 226, 228, 282. 
New truths the oldest, 4. 
Newcomb, Th., 335. 
Nirvana, 244, 306, 309. 
Notes and Queries, 40, 343. 
Novalis, 26. 
Nurnberger, J. C. S., 331. 

Objections to reincarnation, 51-61. 

Oetingen, F. C. von, 52. 

Oldenberg, H., 341. 

Oliphant, Lawrence, 40, 342. 

Olivier, J., 332. 

One Thousand Years Ago (C. G. Leland), 

137. 
One Word More (Robert Browning), 155. 
Origen, 6, 34, 66, 81, 86, 123, 226, 233, 

339. 
Original sin, 32, 85, 116. 



Orpheus and Eurydice, 295. 

Osiander, J. A., 329. 

Ovid, 5, 23, 168, 194, 200, 272, 278, 339. 

Pabacelsus, 50, 65. 

Paradise, 83, 221. 

Parker, S., 334. 

Parsons, Thomas W., 145. 

Paul, Jean, 75, 272, 288. 

Paul, St., 85, 116, 221. 

Paulicians, 227. 

Paulinus, 17. 

Pelagian sin, 32. 

Periodic year, 82, 247. 

Persian Magi, 5, 80, 87. 

Persian poem, 257. 

Persian reincarnation, 199, 247, 274. 

Personality, 26. 

Peru, 6. 

Pezzani, A., 66, 97, 333. 

Pfellus, 81. 

Phaedrus of Plato, 201. 

Phelps, E. S., 292. 

Philo, 6, 81, 210, 224, 332. 

Philolaus, 194. 

Picart, B., 333, 339. 

Pilgrimage philosophy, 60, 61. 

Plato, 5, 27, 71, 81, 104, 126, 201, 280, 
339. 

Platonic poets, 178. 

Platonists, 7, 178. 

Platonists, Cambridge, 6, 65, 179. 

Plato's year, 82, 247. 

Plotinus, 5, 51, 81, 224, 228, 229, 274, 
334, 339. 

Plurality of the Soul's Lives (Pezzani), 
97. 

Plurality of worlds, 66. 

Plutarch, 339. 

Poe, Edgar A., 38, 338, 342. 

Poetry of Reincarnation : American, 
129-145; British, 146-168; Continen- 
tal, 168-177 ; Eastern, 251-260 ; Pla- 
tonic, 178-191. 

Pomponatius, 81. 

Pontius, J. W., 342. 

Porphyry, 66, 196, 229, 282, 329. 

Preexistence. Argued by F. H. Hedge, 
120 ; argued by Prof. Knight, 95 ; 
articles upon, 342 ; books upon, 329- 
343 ; Disquisition on (Jenyns), 87 ; Dr. 
Hodge on, 34 ; experiences of, 36-47 ; 
Hayne's (Paul H.) poem on, 129 ; in 
the Bible, 215-221 ; Miltoni« poem 
on, 181, 335; Plato's, 96, 201, 209; 
seven pillars of, 92. See Reincarna- 
tion. 

Prevalence of reincarnation, 4-7 , 65, 70. 

Priesthood, 280. 

Priestly rites, 6. 

Priscillians, 225, 227. 

Proclus, 5, 81, 229, 275. 

Prodigies, 313. 

Prose writers upon reincarnation, 65- 
123 ; Appendix. 

Prudentius, 237. 

Psychical research, 19. 



INDEX. 



349 



Psychological proofs of reincarnation, 

29-31, 120. 
Psychometry, 284. 
Ptolemy, 18. 
Pythagoras, 5, 39, 71, 7G, 78, 80, 194, 

200, 274, 280, 298. 
Pythagoras, Dream of (poem), 158. 
Pythagoras, Life of, 282, 340. 

Quaeles, ii. 

Rabbins, G. 

Rain in Summer (Longfellow), 142. 

Ramsay, Chevalier, 34, 66, 83, 335. 

Recognition of friends in the future, 60, 
292 295. 

Record, A (W. Sharp), 154. 

Regnaud, P., 334. 

Reincarnation, ancient, 195-212 ; an- 
swers problems of original sin, 32 ; 
curious experiences, 36-46 ; evil, 46, 
116 ; nature of the soul, 29, 120 ; 
arguments for, 20 ; Biblical, 25-221 ; 
Christian, 225-237, 317, 318 ; Eastern, 
241-247 ; Eastern poets on, 251-260 ; 
Esoteric, 263-270 ; objections to, 51- 
61 ; optimistic, 320 ; prevalence of, 
3-7, 70 ; probability of, 117 ; science 
confirming it, 19 ; summary, 309-325 ; 
transmigration through animals, 273 ; 
Western evidences, 11 ; Western au- 
thors upon, poetic, 127-191, prose, 
65-123; What is it? 11. 

Religio Medici, 67, 82, 272. 

Remembrance, A (Dean Alford), 148. 

Renouf, P. L., 341. 

Repulsiveness of reincarnation, 59-61. 

Retreat, The (Henry Vaughan), 189. 

Returning Dreams (Milnes), 150. 

Reynaud, Jean, 66, 333. 

Richter, Jean Paul, 75, 272, 288, 340. 

Rig Veda, 338. 

Ritgen, F., 331. 

Robertson, F. W., 72, 322, 339. 

Roman Catholic Purgatory, 6, 35. 

Rossetti, D. G., 16, 42, 153, 341. 

Rowe, Mrs. Elizabeth, 190. 

Riickert, 7. 

Ruffinus, 226. 

Rust, Dr., 342. 

Sagas of Iceland, 169. 

Sakoontala, 251. 

Sanskrit books, 338, 339. 

Sanskrit poetry, 251-256. 

Schelling, 7, 26, 65. 

Schiller, 175. 

Schilling, W. H.,329. 

Schlegel, 16, 340. 

Schlosser, J. G., 330. 

Schopenhauer, 7, 65, 67, 288, 332, 340. 

Schubert, G. H., 331. 

Schubert, J. E. von, 64, 330. 

Science, 7, 19, 25, 27. 

Scott, Sir W., 36, 214. 

Scott's Christian Life, 67. 

Scotus, 7. 



Scriptural Reincarnation. See Bu 

Secret of Death (Sanskrit), 252. 

Secret of Reminiscence (Schiller), /. 

Sedermark, P., 330. 

Senses, seven, 267. 

Separation from friends, 60, 292, 295. 

Seven in Oriental philosophy, 265. 

Shakespeare, 272. 

Sharp, William, 154. 

Shelley, P. B , 64, 298 ; anecdote of, 92 ; 

poetry of, 187, 188. 
Sibbern, F. C.,329. 
Simonists, 72. 
Simrock, K., 332. 
Sin, original, 32, 85, 116. 
Sinnet, A. P., 337, 341. 
Smedley, 338. 
Socrates, 7. 
Solomon, 84, 216. 

Song of the Earth Spirits (Goethe), 175. 
Soul, immortahty of the, 20, 94. 
Soul, nature of the, 29, 120. 
Soul of Things (Denton), 284. 
Southey, 94. 

Spencer, Herbert, 19, 28. 
Spenser, 16. 
Spiesz, E., 332. 
Stahl, G. E., 26, 27. 
Stanzas (T. W. Parsons), 145. 
St. Bernard, 298. 
Stevenson, R. L., 55, 341. 
Stewart and Tait's Unseen Universe, 17, 

289. 
Stories of reincarnation, 41, 42, 55, 341. 
Successful Search (Poem), 260. 
Sudden Light (D. G. Rossetti), 153. 
Sufis, 247, 251 , 259. 
Swedenborg, 7, 65. 
Symbols of reincarnation, 282. 
Synesius, 81, 236. 
Syrianus, 275. 

Talmud, 6, 72, 340. 

Tatham, Emma, 158. 

Taylor, Bayard, 131, 133, 308. 

Taylor, Isaac, 16, 50, 288. 

Taylor's (Isaac) Physical Theory of a 

Future Life, 19, 29, 336. 
Tennyson, A., 151, 152, 309, 320. 
Theologians, 6, 7, 18, 32, 47, 66, 86. 
Thompson, Maurice, 139. 
Through the Gates of Gold, 16,264, 338. 
Timgeus, 201, 340. 
Timbs, John, 336. 

To my Daughter (E. W. Gosse), 147. 
Translations into English, 338. 
Transmigration (H. H. Boyesen), 170. 
Transmigration of Souls (Be"ranger), 173. 
Transmigration through animals, 77, 87, 

273-285. 
Tredwell, D. N., 338. 
Trench, R. C, 257. 
Trinius, J. A., 330. 
Trismegist, 80. 
Triple form of teaching by the priest' 

hood, 280, 282. 
Trowbridge, J. T., 141. 



INDEX. 






h, John, 336. 

r, 154. 
,cen, C, 332. 
Twilight (J. R. Lowell), 142. 
Two Voices (Tennyson), 151. 
Tyler, E. B., 338. 

Ungern-Sternberg, C. F., 331. 
Upham, E., 337. 

Valentinians, 72. 
Valentinius, 228. 
Vane, Sir Harry, 7. 
Vangerow, W. G., 330. 
Vaughan, Henry, 189. 
Virgil, 5, 81, 168. 
Voltaire, 328. 

Waddington, ii. 

Warren, E., 335. 

Wasseljew, W., 330. 

Ways of the Spirit (F. H. Hedge), 120. 

Weber, 332. 






Webster, D., 300. 

Wedekind, G., 331. 

Welsh Triads, 6, 169, 275. 

Wendel, Z. A., 330. 

Wernsdorf, G.,330. 

Western writers upon Reincarnation: 

prose, 65-123 and Appendix ; poetical, 

127-191. 
What is Reincarnation ? 11. 
Wheeler, J. T., 336. 
Whitman, Walt, 143, 144, 308, 328. 
Whittier, J. G., ii, 130. 
Wigan's (Dr.) Duality of the Mind, 44. 
Wilkinson, Sir J. G., 282, 336. 
Willis, N. P., 41,141,341. 
Wilson, H. H., 337,338. 
Wordsworth, W., 146, 328. 
World as Will and Idea, The, 67. 

Young, Thomas, 16. 

Zohar, the, 212. 

Zoroaster, 80, 194, 199, 247, 274. 






